The Quaternary in the Tropics

The Ice Age (Quaternary) is a period of extreme climate fluctuations that led to the growth and melting of massive ice sheets in the high latitudes. Tropical deserts, savannas, rainforests, and mountainous regions experienced equal dramatic climatic changes of which the traces are preserved in sedimentary deposits. The knowledge of tropical climate history is of paramount importance because in the tropics and marginal tropics, natural and - more recently - human-induced processes significantly control global climate. Yet relatively few palaeoclimate records are known from these regions. This book presents the climate archives of the tropics and critically discusses their palaeoclimatic informative value. Based on decades of research the author demonstrates that a lack of geoecological knowledge leads to misinterpretations in modeling climate futures. The results presented here call for a correction of many widely held views about the role of atmospheric greenhouse gases in globalwarming over the past 150 years. The book is intended for natural scientists of all disciplines who are looking for a synopsis of the problem area "Our climate in the past, present and future in the tropics". The author Professor Dr. rer. nat. Klaus Heine has been researching prehistoric climate since the 1970s, combining glacial geology, desert research, fluvial morphology, and soil science in a multidisciplinary way. Numerous research visits, often lasting several months, have taken him to Mexico, southern Africa, the South American tropics, and Australia. In addition to teaching at the Universities of Bonn, Saarbrücken, and Regensburg, he was a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia (Canada) in 1994 and at Kyoto University (Japan) in 2005/06. He is (co-)author of 150 publications in national and international journals and (co-)editor of several scientific books. He discussed his results in national and international seminars, projects, congresses, and field trips on five continents. Like no other, he surveys the development of global change research since its beginnings and can mediate hotly contested views on climate change.