Marine Palynologie

Climate and marine environment reconstruction

Climate is changing

Anthropogenic activities pollute the seas and oceans.

What effects does climate change and human activity have on marine ecosystems?

How did climate change affected past societies and what does this teaches us about the resilience of our own society?

Do governmental measurements have effects?

What is the natural variability of marine ecosystems ?

We study these questions by using the past as key to the present.

We use the marine palynomorph association in marine sedimentary archives and long term sediment trap series to reconstruct the upper ocean environment in the past.

Hereby we focus on archives at sites that are characterized by high sedimentation rates.

This allows us to study changes with a resolution of several years (=sub-decadal).

For instance:

We could identify for the South Italian region during Roman times, a strong relationship between the transfer of a stable climate to unstable conditions and societal turmoil and the occurrence of the first pandemics in Europe (Zonneveld et al., 2024; Paparella 2025).

We could identify processes that lead to the preservation of micro plastics in Norwegian coastal sediments (Wu et al., 2024).

We could reconstruct the effects of climate induced sea level changes on southern Brazil coastal ecosystems (Kuhn et al., 2023)

Cited publications

Paparella, C. S. Bernard, M. Bini, A. Columbu, I. Isola, K. Harper, R. Post, K. Zonneveld, G. Zanchetta. (2025) Historical archives from the Roman Monarchic and Republican periods show human perceptions of environment and climate change in Italy, 753-29 BCE". The Holocene. published “online first” https://doi.org/10.1177/095968362413073

Gu, F., Zonneveld, K.A.F., Behling, H. (2025). Meridional shifts of Brazil-Malvinas Confluence since the Last Glacial Maximum. Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology and Paleoecology 667.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2025.112897

Zonneveld, K.A.F., Harper, K., Klügel, A., Chen, L., de Lange, G., Versteegh, G.J.M. (2024). Climate Change, Society, and Pandemic Disease in Roman Italy between 200 BCE and 600 CE. Science advances vol 10, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adk1033.

Wu, F., K.A.F. Zonneveld, H. Wolschke, R. von Elm, S. Primpke, S., G.J.M. Versteegh, and G. Gerdts, G. (2024). Diving into the depths: uncovering microplastics in Norwegian coastal sediment cores. Environmental Science and Technology 58. 17036 - 17047. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.4c04360

Kuhn, L.A., Zonneveld, K.A.F., Souza, P.A., Cancelli, R.R. (2023). Late Quaternary palaeoenvironmental evolution and sea level oscillation of the Santa Catarina Island (southern Brazil). Biogeosciences, 20 (10), 1843–1861. doi.org/10.5194/bg-20-1843-2023