I am Stan Schouten. I currently doing my PhD at the university Bern focusing on rapid climate change throughout the Pleisto- and Holocene. I wrote my master thesis on lacustrine climate reconstruction at Utrecht University from lake sediment cores from across Europe. Besides I did a minor at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) where I was properly introduced to arctic fieldwork. I saw the changes that are upon the Arctic environment in front of my own eyes, yet we cannot fully understand certain processes that govern these changes. With the eye on the changing climate, understanding past rapid environmental changes on high resolution becomes more and more significant. I am working on resolving paleorecords on a human relevant time scales to illustrate the fragility of the climate where humanity is so heavily depending on. Understanding how the sedimentary and physical processes operate is of great importance, if we want to act upon changes in our environment. How is the system interconnected? Are natural processes already set to taken over and reinforce into a feedback spiral? And how might these so-called tipping point work, when do we exceed them? In my opinion such questions are of great relevance. To answer these questions, we obviously have to pinpoint abrupt climate changes, when have they happened, what is their magnitude and is there a clear link to certain early warning signals?
