High-resolution climatic impacts on shallow-water marine ecosystems during the Holocene

英国政府首席科学顾问戴维·金爵士将气候变化描述为“人类最紧迫的问题之一”，其影响将在陆地和海洋环境中都能看到。海洋水循环控制着西北欧的区域气候变化，也影响着海洋生态系统、渔业和气候对人为排放的敏感性。如果要成功模拟未来气候变化对海洋生态系统和相关渔业的影响，我们需要高度详细地说明过去的气候变化是如何影响这些生态系统的。这可以通过研究气候变异性在过去10000年--全新世--对海洋生态系统的影响来实现。然而，西北欧没有这样详细的数据。这项研究将研究全新世大部分时间内保存在按时间顺序排列的浅水海相碳酸盐沉积中的化石组合。目标层状碳酸盐矿床是由藻类形成的，活着时拥有非常多样化的伴生生物群落，使它们成为过去组合结构的理想记录器，但迄今仍未利用这一能力。这些相关组合随时间的任何变化，都将与海洋气候的历史变化有关，这些变化是通过为此次调查开发的新型有机记录器--藻类沉积本身--获得的。这项调查获得的数据在确定预测的未来气候变化可能如何影响海洋生态系统和人类方面具有重要的应用，人类是全球目标生态系统的最终用户。此外，北大西洋迫切需要记录过去温度的有机记录器，以帮助完善欧洲对未来100年的气候预测。因此，为这项研究开发的新型记录器产生的高度详细的数据对于获得北大西洋海洋环流的分年度历史温度数据具有更广泛的意义，这可能有助于更好地了解全新世期间影响区域气候的北海热传输动力学的全球努力。

Climate change has been described as 'one of the most pressing matters to mankind' by Sir David King, the Chief Scientific advisor to the government and its impacts are to be seen both in terrestrial and marine environments. Oceanic water circulation controls regional climate change in North West Europe and also affects marine ecosystems, fisheries and climatic susceptibility to man-made emissions. If attempts to model the impacts of future climate change on marine ecosystems and associated fisheries are to succeede, we require a highly detailed description of how past climatic changes have affected those ecosystems. This can be achieved by examining how climatic variability has impacted marine ecosystems during the last ~10000 years, the Holocene. However, no such highly-detailed data exist for North West Europe. This study will investigate fossil assemblages preserved in chronologically ordered, shallow-water, marine carbonate deposits spanning most of the Holocene. The stratified carbonate deposits targetted are formed by algae and host very diverse communities of associated organisms while alive, making them ideal recorders of past assemblage structure, yet remain un-utilised in that capacity to date. Any changes in those associated assemblages with time, will be related to historical changes in marine climate obtained from a novel organic recorder developed for this investigation, the algal deposit itself. Data obtained by this investigation have important applications in determining how predicted future climate change is likely to impact marine ecosystems and humans who are the end users of comercially targeted ecosystems. Additionlly, organic recorders of past temperatures are urgently needed for the North Atlantic to help refine European climate predictions for the next 100 years. Thus the highly detailed data yielded from the novel recorder developed for this study has wider significance in obtaining sub-annual historical temperature data for North Atlantic oceanic circulation, which may feed into a global push to better understand the dynamics of heat transfer in northern seas affecting regional climates during the Holocene.