| The Swedish government has launched state funded research schools for teachers to improve the education and study results in schools. The research school for teachers focusing on Natural Hazards has brought together 12 teachers from all over Sweden to improve their knowledge and skills in geoscience parallel with their ordinary educational assignment. The different projects range over volcanoes, landslides, earthquakes and paleoclimatic changes. Involvement in the research process increases critical thinking and the goal is to bring a more scientific way of working back to our schools together with our specific knowledge in our research areas.
The name of the ongoing project that I am working on is ”Asian monsoon variability and its impact on terrestrial ecosystems in southern Thailand during the Holocene “. The Asian monsoon system is one of the most dynamic climate systems on Earth. It largely controls the climate in Asia and in the Indo-Pacific region. The main objective of this project is to reconstruct changes in the status of Nong Thale Prong in southern Thailand through the analysis of a sediment sequence. By means of this method we expect to be able to evaluate to what extent these changes are linked to known shifts in monsoon intensity and variability.
The working hypothesis is that intervals dominated by intense summer monsoon and higher precipitation resulted in higher catchment run-off and an increased input of terrestrial plant material to the lakes. In contrast, open catchment vegetation and less input of terrestrial organic material are signs of a weaker summer monsoon and a stronger northeast monsoon. |