Bachelor and Master projects

1. Reconstructing temperature and precipitation in southern Italy at times of the so called "great transition" and "second Plague Pandemic" in Europe (ca. 1200 CE - 1400 CE)

Aim: Obtain insight into the relationship between climate change and human health and society history.

The current climate change fuels discussions about how and to what extend the climate change can influence our present day society and health. Despite that investigations on the relationships between climate change and human history have already a long tradition, there are still many unsolved questions due to the fact that climate-society and climate-human health relationship are far from straightforward. To study this relationship it is essential to have regionally specific, continuous, well dated, high temporal-resolution proxy records from regions where detailed historical information is available such as the southern Italian region.

In recent work we could show a strong relationship between changes in southern Italian temperature and precipitation and the occurrence of the fist pandemics in Europe during Roman times (Zonneveld et al., Science Advance 2024). Dinoflagellate cyst based environmental reconstructions using a world-wide unique marine archive from the Gulf of Taranto made this possible.

The master projects intents to extend this work to a period of the second large Plague Pandemic in Europe that caused an enormous loss of human lives and caused large societal change and turmoil.

We want to investigate to what extend changes in local climate correlate to these Pandemics.

Available Material:

High quality material is available from a marine archive of the South Italian "Gulf of Taranto". The archive is well dated by 14C, 120Pb/137/Cs and tephrochronology making a reconstruction allowing a detailed comparison with historical data. Reconstructions can be established with a 3 years temporal resolution.

Methods

Reconstructions will be based on the analysis of the dinoflagellate cyst association. For this sediments will be processed by chemical treatment (HCL and HF). Data will be analysed by multivariate statistical methods.

Knowledge to be present:

General background knowledge about oceanography and dinoflagellate ecology

Special skills to be learned:

Information about potential climate forcing factors (solar forcing, volcanic activity, differential climate modes etc.), combination with archeological information, Frequency analysis/wavelett analysis. Modern analogue techniques.