15,000 Yr pollen records from High Andean Lakes in the Subtropical Semiarid Chile (32ºS).

MALDONADO A.D; CARDENA J.; MARTEL-CEA K.; SCHITTEK M.E. DE PORRAS ; MOREIRAS, S.M.

Tupungato, Mendoza

Conferencia; 4th Southern Deserts Conference; 2012

The understanding of the climate of a particular zone needs a long term picture that allows elucidating modern climatic trends, broad scale cycles, climatic variability and climate change mechanisms (natural or anthropic). Furthermore, palaeoclimatic data allow the validation of the general circulation models outputs while providing clues to picture modern and future climatic scenarios for the models through the establishment of past environmental analogs. According to future IPCC climate predictions, Mediterranean Chile (30-34°S) is one of those areas in the world which are experimenting a strong aridification trend as a consequence of the ongoing climatic change. If this trend continues, critical economic and social future scenarios will arise in Mediterranean Chile given that it is a densely populated zone with extensive industrial and agriculture development. Mediterranean Chile appears therefore as an extremely vulnerable area to climatic change so understanding its natural climatic variability emerge as crucial to picture future scenarios. Despite that water resources of this densely populated area originate from high Andean basins, most paleoclimatical studies from Mediterranean Chile have been developed in the lowlands. In the present paper, we present two pollen records from lakes located in the high Andes of subtropical South America (31º40?S; 70º30?W) encompassing the last 15,300 cal years B.P.