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Upcoming Meetings:

 Student Travel Grants Available

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

Special Report:
    Vision for Geomorphology &
    Quaternary Science

The Quaternary Times
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2005 Northeastern Friends of the Pleistocene meeting

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Society of American Archaeology Fellowship Announcement

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Announcements

PAGES Solicits Input from AMQUA Members
PAGES is the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Core Project charged with providing a quantitative understanding of the Earth's past climate and environment, with special reference to those aspects that help shed light on current trends and future changes. During the next few months, as part of a pan-IGBP review, the paleoenvironmental research community worldwide is asked for input into the future shape of the PAGES scientific agenda. We are soliciting views from interested groups including the membership of AMQUA. At this stage, we propose to leave the future organization as open as possible. As a strawman, four major components of PAGES with some degree of overlap and intersection, are:
1. World-wide coordinated research on past climate and Earth system changes.
2. Past human impacts and their interaction with natural environmental variability.
3. Coordinating the use of paleo-records and modeling with the goal of improving future climate predictability.
4. Cross-cutting and support elements such as paleoenvironmental databases, coordinated modeling efforts and outreach.
Within the framework of these suggestions, we invite responses to:

• To what extent is PAGES fulfilling the role you believe it should play in international global change science? What are the aspects that have been successful and which need improvement?
• What key points should be considered at this stage in the development of PAGES?
• Taking a broad view of PAGES, to what extent do you see a need for a more regional approach as opposed to the global approach emphasized so far?
• What would you see as the ideal relationship between PAGES and organizations such as AMQUA?

To prepare for the next PAGES executive committee meeting, responses to this questionnaire (to oldfield@pages.unibe.ch) are most welcome - by the end of June if at all possible.

Frank Oldfield and Keith Alverson
PAGES International Project Office

Changes at the WDC
for Paleoclimatology
As this is being written, big changes in personnel are underway at the World Data Center (WDC) for Paleoclimatology. Located at NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder, CO, the WDC is part of the network of World Data Centers established by the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). Dr. C. Mark Eakin, formerly of NOAA's Office of Global Programs (OGP), was hired as Director of the WDC in the Spring and will have moved to Boulder by time this is published. Dr. Eakin served as Program Officer for NOAA OGP Paleoclimatology from 1991-1996. Since then he has served as OGP's Program Manager for Climate Dynamics and Experimental Prediction. He brings with him an interest in enhancing interactions between the paleoclimate and modern climate system research communities. The WDC has since hired Dr. Connie Woodhouse, a dendroclimatologist, as a new paleoclimatologist in the program. She brings with her an interest in high resolution reconstructions of past climates, especially drought, and the application of paleo data to water and other natural resources management.
    The WDC has grown steadily under the watchful eye of its founding Director, Dr. Jonathan Overpeck and paleoclimatologists Drs. Robert Webb and David Anderson. We take this opportunity to say farewell to Dr. Overpeck who has moved on to serve as Director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona at Tucson, and to Dr. Webb who left the WDC for NOAA's Climate Diagnostics Center. We are pleased that Dr. Anderson will continue to provide the WDC with his expertise in marine sediment records.
    As the new management of the WDC settles in, we will be developing a set of new priorities for the WDC. At this point, a few of these are clear. We remain committed to expanding our holdings of paleoclimate records and making them available for use by researchers, educators and the public. We are currently developing new tools that will make our data holdings more accessible, especially for multi-proxy comparisons. A recent effort has launched mirror data servers in France, South Africa and Kenya, with plans for more. These mirror sites have increased data access speeds to many parts of the globe. A new effort has begun to reconstruct past climate using high resolution, multi-proxy records with the eventual goal of developing data sets that span both proxy and instrumental climate records. Watch for more news as we explore some exciting new areas.
    In the past, the WDC for Paleoclimatology has been strongly tied to the Paleoclimatology Program Element of NOAA's Office of Global Programs. That program is also undergoing a transition at this time. On June 5-6, 2000 a meeting was held at the National Science Foundation to discuss a potential CLIVAR-PAGES activity. Such an activity would coordinate paleoclimate research supported through NOAA and NSF (much of it a part of the Earth System History program) with research being conducted through the World Climate Research Programme's Climate Variability Programme (WCRP CLIVAR). This should lead to exciting new applications of paleoclimatic research to problems of understanding and predicting climate variability. Stay tuned for more on this as well.
Mark Eakin
NOAA Paleoclimatology Program

PAGES-Quaternary International publication
Call for Papers in conjunction with the PAGES Conference, Praha, September 2000
A special PAGES-Quaternary International publication will focus on the recent advances in methodological approaches in the discipline, as well as research results and achievements of geoarchaeological studies linked to Quaternary climate variations throughout the world.
    Pleistocene-oriented geoarchaeological studies have witnessed major progress and interdisciplinary expansion during the last decade. Apart from palaeolithic research in the "classical" areas, intensive investigations have occurred in other palaeoclimatically significant parts of the world. Due to the nature of the research, which incorporates a wide range of geological and palaeoenvironmental settings related to past human occupation, geoarchaeological investigations are becoming increasingly complex, integrating all aspects of Quaternary studies. Early cultural records represent a significant source of palaeoenvironmental proxy data, complementing geological evidence in reconstructing past climates and climate change.
    The main focal points include: reconstruction of regional palaeoenvironmental histories, in terms of periodicity and intensity of climate variability and change and their impact on the habitat of early human occupation; past climate change and variability as reflected by spatial and temporal distribution of early cultural records within regions; palaeoclimatic implications of new geoarchaeological survey strategies in specific geological settings and cultural record contexts in particular geographical areas; and reconstruction of evolutionary pathways and processes, as well as documentation of the associated natural events registered in the geological records.
    Contact: Jiri Chlachula, Guest Editor, by August 31, 2000. Jiri Chlachula, Laboratory for Palaeoecology, Technical University FT VUT Brno, 762 72 Zlin, Czech Republic; +420-67-761 0212; Fax: -721-0722; jrch@zlin.vutbr.cz

Sedimentary environments of terrestrial end moraines
Following the April 2000 conference on Modern and Ancient Ice-marginal Landsystems, all people interested in end moraines are invited to join the project "Sedimentary environments of terrestrial end moraines" of the INQUA Commission of Glaciation Workgroup: Sedimentology of Glacial Deposits. Proposed activities include exchanging ideas and papers, field workshops, and publication of recently collected data and conclusions from workshops' discussions. 
    Contact: Darek Krzyszkowski, Geologisches Institute, Abteilung Quartargeologie, Universitat zu Koln, Zulpicher Str. 49A, D-50674 Koln, Germany; Fax: 0-49-221-470-5149; Darek.Krzyszkowski@Uni-Koeln.DE

CALIB 4.2
We are pleased to announce the on-line version of the radiocarbon program CALIB 4.2. It can be run from your browser at the following sites: University of Washington http://depts.washington.edu/qil/calib/, and Queen's University of Belfast http://radiocarbon.pa.qub.ac.uk/calib/
    Operating instructions are given on the web page. Not all options of the downloadable versions have been included, but some may be added later. The number of samples which can be entered or pasted into the data area for calibration depends upon various factors but is on the order of 300-400. Plots may be printed directly from your browser or saved as postscript files. The on-line version is otherwise identical to CALIB 4.1.2. It also uses the 1998 international radiocarbon calibration datasets. Please refer to the CALIB 4.1 manual for details about the calibration datasets and calculations.

INQUA data-
handling newsletter
Issue 19 includes notes on calibrating spore tablets (Lou Maher) and on an image database for diatoms (Ernest Joynt and Alexander Wolfe). There is also a link to a set of notes on Data-handling methods that summarize much of the work of the newsletter over the last decade or so. The issue is located at: http://www.kv.geo.uu.se/inqua/