Tropical and subtropical South America hosts the richest terrestrial biodiversity on Earth, and plays a pivotal role in global hydrological and carbon cycles. However, these exceptional environments face mounting threats. As an example, the Amazon rainforest, identified as a core tipping element of the climate system, may be pushed towards irreversible degradation by anthropogenic climate change and land-use pressures, further exacerbating the regional precipitation decline. Forestalling and preparing for such future changes require a comprehensive understanding of the past natural climate and vegetation dynamics in (sub)tropical South America, and of their controlling oceanic and atmospheric drivers.
This session explores the latest research results aimed at understanding the variability of tropical and subtropical South American climate and vegetation across Quaternary timescales (from glacial-interglacial, orbital, to millennial and multidecadal timescales), and the land-atmosphere-ocean interactions that control these changes. We welcome works exploring these interactions from high-resolution paleoclimatic and paleoceanographic reconstructions in (sub)tropical South American terrestrial archives (e.g. sediments, speleothems), and marine archives (e.g. sediments, corals) from the adjacent Atlantic and Pacific margins. We also invite contributions investigating Quaternary (sub)tropical South American climate and related land-ocean-atmosphere interactions based on paleoclimate modelling efforts and/or model-data comparisons.