SEMINAR: OI Seminar Series - Jens Zinke

Jens Zinke from UWA Oceans Institute and School of Earth and Environment.

TITLE: Is the Southern Indian Ocean an active player in climate variability across Africa-Austral-Asia? Insights from long-term coral records

ABSTRACT: The southern Indian Ocean (IO) was long thought to be a passive player in global tropical climate change and not considered to have significantly impacted rapid and extreme events. This view has been challenged recently, in particular after the 1997/98 record breaking El Nino and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) event with associated devastating floods in East Africa and drought in Austral-Asia, and the unpredicted 2002 Indian Monsoon drought, indicating the important control of IO sea surface temperature (SST) and wind changes on such events. Understanding the role of the southern IO for Austral-Asian-African climate and associated rainfall/drought cycles, and its response to internal and remote climate forcing (teleconnections) from the Pacific region remains an outstanding milestone in future climate research. To fill this gap in our knowledge, a new project has been designed to generate paleoclimatic reconstructions of southern IO climate variability from massive corals off western Australia. An overarching aim is to determine how basin-wide Indian Ocean climate phenomena and its global teleconnections affect Australian and circum Indian Ocean climate, and the individual coral reef ecosystems. I will show examples how this can be achieved by combining my previous and ongoing research on coral geochemistry from the western Indian Ocean with those newly obtained off western Australia from the eastern Indian Ocean.

Short Bio: 1996 Masters in Paleontology at the Free University Berlin, Germany. Topic: Dinosaurs 2000 PhD in Marine Geoscience at IFM-GEOMAR/University of Kiel, Germany. Topic: The sedimentological evolution of the lagoon of Mayotte in response to postglacial sea-level rise 2000-2003 postdoc at IFM-GEOMAR Kiel, Germany. “Coral proxy records from the western Indian Ocean and the Caribbean” 2003-2009 postdoc at the Free University Amsterdam, Netherlands “Southern Indian Ocean coral records and teleconnections with the Pacific” 2009-2011 postdoc at Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Team leader for Coral paleoclimatology since 1st June 2011 Assistant Professor at UWA Oceans Institute and School of Earth and Environment in the UWA/AIMS/CSIRO shared researchers scheme

Research area: strong focus on the Indian Ocean