MESH - Marine aspects of Earth System History

Attending: L. Stott, W. Curry, T. Sowers, R. DeConto, G. Dickens, J. Zachos, T. Quinn, A. Winter, J. Brigham-Grette, J. Lynch-Stieglitz, K. Cannariato

Lowell Stott convened the meeting at 7:30 pm

Lowell presented a proposal that is pending at the NSF to produce a special issue of the Oceanography Magazine. The special addition would highlight particular advances in paleoclimatology and paleoceanography that are contributing to our advancing understanding of Earth's climate variability. Authorship of invited articles has not been decided yet but the idea would be to invite a mixture of topics and encourage young scientists to participate, perhaps by collaborating with more well established scientists.

Amos Winter briefly summarized recent funding and success rates at NSF, noting that there had been a roughly 50% increase in the number of MESH proposals and the amount of money available was the same as it was 2 years ago. There was about 40% success rate on the last panel and will likely be lower in the next round.

Amos Winter also summarized the workshops that were held during the past year or so. This included a workshop on methane (Jim Zachos, Gerry Dickens), Tropical Dynamics (Stott), and Abrupt Climate Change. The workshop reports have been submitted to the NSF.

Bill Curry announced that there will be a meeting for PIs participating in the Holocene Initiative in April of next year. The meeting is intended to be a venue for scientists to share results and begin to assess whether there is a coherent millennial-scale pattern of variability through the Holocene. A synthesis of results will likely be submitted to EOS.

Jean Lynch- Steiglitz announced the upcoming meeting on paleocirculation (focus is 14C age scale). A copy of the announcement is posted below.

Julie Brigham- Greete Greete Grette discussed the current status of the Artic Artic Arctic Program and pointed out that funding in Arctic Natural Sciences had been down to a 10 to about 15-18 % success rate and there appears to have been some resistence to “paleo”. . A town meeting was held on this at AGU where confusion was expressed among scientists over the funding of modern process and ocean monitoring work vs. " paleo" within programs like SEARCH and ARCSS.

Julie also suggested that MESH contribute a full PAGES newsletter, highlighting activities taking place in the community. The committee agreed that this would be a good idea. Julie will take a lead on this and will solicit suggestions for articles . for a newsletter in 2006. The MESH Chair should be a guest editor along with Julie.

Jim Zachos discussed frustration some have experienced with the limited focus of MESH and expressed a desire to see support for a methane initiative. After some discussion Lowell suggested that while the committee could not facilitate new initiatives at the present time, the committee could solicit comments from the community and the committee could act as a conduit of this information to NSF. The committee members were urged to bring comments from the community to the next committee meeting.

Rob DeConto highlighted the status of the Andrill Project.

Todd Sowers mentioned the increased attention being paid to specific time intervals associated with marked climate change during the Holocene. This includes the 8.2ka event and another one at 5.2ka.

Bill Curry summarized the status of the US long coring facility currently being developed at WHOI. It appears that the system will be fully tested and potentially available for proposed projects in 2006.

The committee discussed David Verardo's suggestion that the community needed to reach out more aggressively to under-represented communities. Each committee member provided perspective on this and agreed to urge the community to take on this as a goal.

The meeting ended at 9:00 pm.


	© 2005 MESH