Past million years climatic evolution in numerical clIMate transiENT simulatiOns

Despite the existing climate simulations and paleoclimate records that cover the last 3 million years, the interactions and mechanisms between the Earth system components are still poorly understood with a missing coherent interpretation of the concomitant climatic and environmental changes. In this project, we therefore propose to provide new inputs on the comprehension of the last 3 Ma climate changes using the coupled Earth system model of intermediate complexity iLOVECLIM. We will use a similar splitting technique as recently presented in several studies to perform the first long transient 3 Ma simulation with this model. In contrast to previous studies that used combined forcing only, we will here realize multiple simulations with individual (orbital, greenhouse gases concentration and ice-sheet) and combined forcings to investigate the role and the importance of each forcing on the climatic and environmental changes during the past 3 Ma. The iLOVECLIM model has also the advantage to include the stable isotopes (in the water cycle, of the atmospheric oxygen and of the leaf wax) that have not been studied in any climate simulation over this time period yet, whereas numerous paleoclimate dataset are based on isotopic measurements and are available for model-data comparison/integration.