Abstract ATM-9632286 Ziegler, Alfred M. University of Chicago Title: Collaborative Research: Analysis of Simulated and Observed Changes in Climate and Environments Across the Permian Deglaciation The Permian Period contains a transition from a major glaciation to a fully ice-free state. This transition has been ascribed to an increase in atmospheric CO2, and could thus provide an analog in the geologic record for the likely results of human perturbations to the Earth system over the next millennium. This award supports a project to assemble the extensive sources of information on the Permian environment into a unified relational database. This will permit a global assessment of data patterns and their temporal and spatial relationships and will help to determine whether local changes are due to continental motions, rather than "global change." Another aspect of this work is to determine the reliability of the paleoclimate indicators (e.g. dating uncertainties), and thus how unequivocally such data may be used to validate the climate model predictions. These experiments will establish the sensitivity to realistic changes during the Permian in two important climate forcing factors, paleogeography and atmospheric CO2, and their role in explaining the large-scale features of the Permian deglaciation.
