Dynamics of Pleistocene climate change in the South Atlantic Ocean

• Main Author: Scussolini, P
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam 2014
• Subjects: South Atlantic Ocean
• Online Access: https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00493/60441/63886.pdf; https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00493/60441/

How does the surface of the earth work? What is the interplay between water and air, and the continents and the sea floor? Can we understand the laws underlying this cosmos of countless revolving and clashing particles whose result we call climate? The piece in your hands originates from the preoccupation with the intimate functioning of the land and oceans, the places where we spend the vast majority of our time, and from the persuasion that to decrypt the the turbulent phenomena under our eyes the ancient affairs of the matter must lie under the magnifying glass. To glance into the old memories of this evolving planet is no job for the feeble hearted, nor for the exact mind. There is no measuring the height, the weight, the speed, the warmth of things that rest by now only in our imagination. The past is stone dead. Yet, in stone indeed, and in matter creeping towards the stony form, headstrong men have gazed and found the traces of the past, and even earnestly formulated protocols to make sense of them, to even attribute numbers to events long forgotten. These devices from a line of wayward men of knowledge I have learned to handle during three years. I have husbanded the transformation of mute substrate from underneath the sea into inaccurate and imprecise number; and I have accompanied my product to that of my fellows before and beside me, so that the communion of our scanty tiles might form a grater and more discernible image. In a process so patently akin to a legitimate form of magic, I performed the science of the past oceans. Looking now at this manuscript, and behind it at the concatenation of events of which it tells, events amidst the dark and cold sea, where nothing but Atlantic water is for hundreds of meters above and below and left and right, events in the sedimentology lab and down its sinks, events of green beaches swallowed by the relentlessly growing blue waves, events into the slender plasma torch where heat is more intense than on the surface of the sun, and events in front of a gleaming word document late at night, I am stupefied at the prodigy of man’s questioning. With the joyous purpose of adding my humble tile to the relentlessly focusing chronicle of all of the above, I assembled the following pages.