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10th CAVEPS and Quaternary Extinction Symposium
March 29 - April 2, 2005
Naracoorte, SA, Australia

CANQUA June 5-8, 2005
NOTICE: The server to the Winnipeg CANQUA abstract submission site has been periodically down for the past day or so. Please try again if you've been rebuffed; the format and address can be found on the meeting web site <http:www.umanitoba.ca/canqua>. We are extending the deadline until next week.

2^nd International Congress
“The World of Elephants”
Hot Springs, South Dakota, USA September 22-25,  2005

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The Quaternary Times
Newsletter of the American Quaternary Association
Volume 29 Number 1 May 1999

News from the AMQUA Councilors

Report on: "Geomorphology and Quaternary Science Beyond 2000"
Bob Anderson, Russ Graham and I very hastily organized in February (6 & 7) a NSF workshop on the future directions for Quaternary Science and Geomorphology. This was precipitated by the need to feed something quickly to the Board of Earth Sciences and Resources (BESR) of the National Academy of Sciences chaired by Tom Jordan of MIT. BESR is developing a 10-year plan on "Opportunities for research in the Earth Sciences" to be completed by the end of 1999. This is independent of the GEO 2000 vision statement that Bob Correll and Geoscience Directorate is shepherding through the community. The report "A Vision for Geomorphology and Quaternary Science Beyond 2000" of the workshop will be completed shortly. It will be forwarded to Tom Jordan and posted on the AMQUA web page.
Emi Ito
Geochronology, Geophysics, and Geochemistry Councilor

Quaternary Information Clearinghouse
As a Quaternary scientist with a web page that discusses Pleistocene environments (more than 37,000 people have looked at my web page), I receive a steady stream of ice-age questions from students, teachers, and the general public. Sometimes I have the answers readily at hand, but other times I do not, especially when the question deals with a specific region of North America or elsewhere in the world. It occurs to me that it would be a useful outreach tool for AMQUA to develop a list of web sites and regional experts who could field such questions from the general public. I floated this idea around the AMQUA council via e-mail, and got a set of very positive responses. I am willing to spearhead this initiative, but I will need some help with brainstorming a list of regional experts to be contacted. We need to build a list of useful web sites and regional experts on archaeology, glacial geology, paleoclimatology, terrestrial paleobiology, and paleoceanography. Once the information is gathered, we could make a link from the AMQUA home page, directing students (and others in the general public) to an ice-age reference web page where they could track down answers to their questions. Once this is set up, then AMQUA members who receive queries about Quaternary environments, flora, fauna, and archaeology, could direct inquiries to this web page.
Please contact me directly (303-492-5158; saelias@colorado.edu) if you are interested in participating in this initiative, either by serving as a regional expert, or by contributing information on useful resources found on the worldwide web.
Scott Elias
Paleobiology Councilor


Abrupt Climate Change Research
With the growing awareness that the Earth's climate system can shift abruptly, without warning, from one climate state to another, comes the need to develop the scientific understanding necessary to anticipate "climate surprises" of the future, both natural and human induced. The paleoclimate record makes it clear that abrupt climate shifts of the 20th century are only a subset of possible surprise climate system behavior that might occur, particularly with regard to ENSO, Asian-African monsoons, North Atlantic climate change, and North American drought variability. Whereas a partial understanding of abrupt climate change can be derived from the instrumental record and modeling studies, only with a much improved paleoclimatic perspective can the full range of possible seasonal to interdecadal climate variability and abrupt change be understood, and the realism of predictive models be fully validated. Despite the abundance of abrupt climate change theories, there remains a deficiency in the mechanistic understanding of abrupt climate reorganizations in the past and the potential for future occurrences based on the current climate system's internal variability coupled with external forcing factors such as increasing global CO2 levels.
Paleoclimatologists have been aware for decades that the climate system is capable of behavior quite unlike that of the present day. However, paleoclimatology has tended to follow the lead of the climate dynamics community, and to pursue research primarily under the assumption that the Earth's climate tends to change gradually in response to slowly changing climate forcing. The first major revolution of modern paleoclimatology was the establishment of a slowly changing Earth-Sun relationship as the pacemaker of the Ice Ages (i.e., "Milankovitch Theory"). On the other end of the range of climate variability, early successes with seasonal to interannual climate prediction benefitted from a well-described stable mode of ENSO variability in the late 1980's.
Over the last 20 years, however, a new paradigm of climate variability has emerged. Abrupt climate change now is recognized to be widespread throughout history and many different variability states over all time scales of variability have been identified within the climate system. Understanding only one variability state, or even a few, leaves climate prediction efforts susceptible to unanticipated failures.
With the acknowledgement that the climate system can shift abruptly from one mode of variability to another, and can do so on a variety of time scales, comes the questions: How? And Why? Coupled models and process studies can be used to investigate the mechanisms behind potential abrupt climatic change, but relevance to the real world cannot be assured without the constraints of an observational record. The paleoclimatic record, which includes time series of internal and external forcings, climate variability, and abrupt change over the multiple centuries and millennia, represents the only observational record long enough to provide these constraints. Without doubt, the climate system is not stationary on time scales of decades and centuries and a predictive understanding of climate variability can only follow from understanding the full range of climate variability. Just as an understanding of climate variability and predictability cannot come without an extensive array of instrumental observations, an understanding of the full range of variability is impossible without an extended array of paleoclimatic observations of past changes and external forcings.
One of the major uncertainties in global climate change relates to the mechanisms and causes of abrupt climate change. Only when scientists understand the responses of the climate system to the range of different climate forcing conditions as have occurred in the past, and attribute responses to individual forcings, we will be able to predict future climate change. We conclude that a new exciting paleoclimate research opportunity is now evolving to focus the attention of the climate dynamics community on abrupt climate change of "warm climates" like those of today and the future.
Jonathan Overpeck
and Robert Webb
Paleoclimatology Councilor

Conference Report: Canadian Archaeological Association
The 32nd Annual Canadian Archaeological Association Conference was held in Whitehorse, Yukon, on April 28 - May 2, 1999. The conference featured a special symposium organized by Catherine Carlson to honor the memory of Arne and Lesley (Mitchell) Carlson. There were a variety of other topics discussed ranging from historical to Pleistocene archaeology. Of particular interest was a symposium on Eastern Beringian Interdisciplinary Research: A Consideration of Past and Present Trends and Issues from a Northern Yukon Perspective. Much of this symposium focused on the Old Crow Area. Jaques Cinq-Mars gave an overview of the research area and projects. John Matthews and Charlie Schweger talked about the rich Tertiary records for plants, vertebrates and insects. Dick Harington reviewed the rich Pleistocene vertebrate record from the area. An extremely detailed glacial map of the northern Yukon was presented by A. Duk-Rodkin. Late Quaternary shorelines were discussed by Tom Hamilton; while, C.A.S. Smith gave an interesting presentation on the multigenetic origin of soils. Finally, Bernard Lauriol discussed geomorphological studies and cave formation in the karst areas. It is clear that there is still a phenomenally rich Quaternary record to be studied in this part of the world.
The timing of human entry into this area is still a point of debate. Jacque Cinq-Mars argued that a vast amount of evidence for multiple human entries has been ignored because of "guilt by association" when the "now infamous" caribou tibia flesher was dated as late Holocene. Dick Morlan talked about the ca. 40,000 year old fractured mammoth bones and indicated that they are unique to the stratigraphic section. Clearly, these sites deserve more work. Finally, Don Clark essentially sank the British Mountain component at Engigstaciak as a candidate for early people through a detailed analysis of the artifacts and archival records.
There was a field trip on Sunday to a series of local archaeological sites. In all, it was an outstanding meeting and great fun.

Russ Graham
AMQUA President