The Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research regularly invites visiting scientists to participate in its activities. Prof. Dr. Edouard Bard, who will present his widely recognised research in a series of lectures at the University of Bern, is the first guest staying with the Oeschger Centre. Edouard Bard holds the chair of "Evolution of the Climate and the Ocean" at the Collège de France. His laboratory is located in Aix-en-Provence, France.
Bard's various studies are at the interface of climatology, oceanography and geology. The essential objective of his work is to understand the natural functioning of the ocean-atmosphere system on time scales ranging from a few centuries to several million years. Bard aims to document these changes more fully, to date them precisely and to understand their mechanisms. Modelling the changes in the ocean-atmosphere system is an important task within the framework of projects aimed at predicting the future evolution of the climate.
For this research, Bard uses the techniques of analytical chemistry to determine the extent and the timing of climatic variations. New quantitative methods have enabled him to reconstruct past climates using varied natural archives such as oceanic sediments, lake sediments, corals, stalagmites and polar ice.
The guiding principle in Bard's work is the study of the same climatic phenomena, for example the glaciations, using complementary and often innovative geochemical techniques. Another characteristic of this research is the to-and-fro of information between recent and older periods. Indeed, the variations of the climate involve mechanisms with very different time-constants. "It is thus necessary", says Edouard Bard, "to have the eye of the geologist, while maintaining the quantitative rigour of the ‘actualistic' climatologist."
