Pliocene climates of the Northern Hemisphere; abstracts of the joint US/USSR workshop on Pliocene paleoclimates, Moscow, USSR, April, 1990

Abstract

A joint US-USSR workshop met at the Laboratory of Paleogeography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow from April 20th to 23rd, 1990 to discuss Pliocene paleoclimates and to develop a joint long- term research program. Soviet participants included more than fifteen scientists from across the USSR, and the United States was represented by four scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (Table 1). As with the 1989 Denver Pliocene workshop (Gosnell and Poore, 1990), the objectives of the 1990 Moscow workshop included establishing the chronology and amplitude of Pliocene climatic changes, mapping the spatial patterns in these variations, and determining the biologic responses to climatic change (see also Cronin and Dowsett, 1991, for further Pliocene paleoclimatic studies). These data will form the basis for explorations of General Circulation Model simulations of Pliocene paleoclimates and will provide insights into the nature of climatic circulation in a warmer-than-modern mean global climate state.