Pliocene climates of the Northern Hemisphere; abstracts of the joint US/USSR workshop on Pliocene paleoclimates, Moscow, USSR, April, 1990

A joint US-USSR workshop met at the Laboratory of Paleogeography
of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow from April 20th to
23rd, 1990 to discuss Pliocene paleoclimates and to develop a joint long-
term research program. Soviet participants included more than fifteen
scientists from across the USSR, and the United States was represented by
four scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (Table 1). As with the 1989
Denver Pliocene workshop (Gosnell and Poore, 1990), the objectives of the
1990 Moscow workshop included establishing the chronology and
amplitude of Pliocene climatic changes, mapping the spatial patterns in
these variations, and determining the biologic responses to climatic change
(see also Cronin and Dowsett, 1991, for further Pliocene paleoclimatic
studies). These data will form the basis for explorations of General
Circulation Model simulations of Pliocene paleoclimates and will provide
insights into the nature of climatic circulation in a warmer-than-modern
mean global climate state.