INTIMATE 1995 to 2009
At a Workshop Session following the NASP Symposium, the INTIMATE programme was formally established, with John Lowe as Project Co-ordinator and Mike Walker as Secretary. INTIMATE was designed to encourage collaboration between the ice-core, marine and terrestrial communities that had begun during the later stages of the NASP programme, and to integrate the increasing number of high-resolution proxy climate records from the Last Termination that were becoming available from different parts of the North Atlantic realm. The aim was also to underpin the proxy records for climate change with high-resolution chronologies, and to correlate key events in order to determine leads and lags in the climate system during the Last Glacial-Interglacial Transition (LGIT).
Organisation of INTIMATE 1995-2009
INTIMATE was organised through a Secretariat involving the Co-ordinator, Secretary, and a Steering Group. The Co-ordinators have been John Lowe (1995-2003), Wim Hoek (2003-2008) and Chris Turney (2008-2010). The Secretary’s position has been held by Mike Walker (1995-1999), Wim Hoek (1999-2003), and Zicheng Yu (2003-2008). The first Steering Group was appointed at the Hoor Workshop in 1997 (see below), and was composed of John Lowe and Mike Walker (ex-officio), Sigfus Johnsen (ice core community), Karen-Luise Knudsen (marine community), Svante Bjorck and Barbara Wohlfarth (terrestrial community: Europe) and Les Cwynar (terrestrial community: North America). In 2003 following the Reno Workshop at the XVIth INQUA Congress, and in response to the expanded remit of INTIMATE (see below), a new Steering Group was appointed, with Wim Hoek and Zicheng Yu as ex-officio members, seven regional co-ordinators (Svante Bjorck – Northern Europe; Thomas Litt – Central Europe; Sjoerd Bohncke – Western Europe; Blas Valero-Garces – Southern Europe; Les Cwynar – North American Atlantic Seaboard; Fabienne Marret – African Atlantic Seaboard; Karen-Luise Knudsen -Northern Atlantic/GIN Seas; Gerard Bond – Atlantic Marine Records; Sigfus Johnsen and Jorgen-Peder Steffensen – Ice-core Records (GRIP); Pieter Grootes; Ice-core records (GISP2); Bernd Kromer – Radiocarbon calibration; Siwan Davies – Tephrochonrology; and Hans Renssen – Palaeoclimatic modelling. Sadly Gerard Bond passed away on 29th June 2005. He had been active in INTIMATE since the start of the project, was a keynote speaker at the INTIMATE Symposium in Durban in 1999, and attended several INTIMATE Workshops. His death was a great loss to Quaternary science.
The INTIMATE Steering Group, Hoor, Sweden, 1997. Left to right: Sigfus Johnsen, John Lowe, Barbara Wohlfarth, Karen-Luise Knudsen, Svante Bjorck and Mike Walker; inset, Les Cwynar.
Workshops and Symposia, 1995-2009
Following the inaugural meeting in Berlin, a series of Workshops and Symposia have been held during which the aims of the programme have been discussed and further developed. There have been nine International Workshops:
Hoor, Sweden, October, 1997, convened by Svante Bjorck, Karen-Luise Knudsen, Sigfus Johnsen and Barbara Wohlfarth. The theme of the meeting was the subdivision and chronology of the Last Termination in relation to the ice-core record, and the meeting was attended by 49 scientists from 13 countries.
Fredericton, Canada, August, 1998, convened by Les Cwynar and attended by more than 30 scientists. This meeting reviewed a range of data-sets from the last-interglacial transition from both western Europe and eastern North America.