Enhanced climate instability in the North Atlantic and southern Europe during the Last Interglacial

PC Tzedakis; RN Drysdale; V Margari; LC Skinner; L Menviel; RH Rhodes; AS Taschetto; DA Hodell; SJ Crowhurst; JC Hellstrom; AE Fallick; JO Grimalt; JF McManus; B Martrat; Z Mokeddem; F Parrenin; E Regattieri; K Roe; G Zanchetta

Journal article

Enhanced climate instability in the North Atlantic and southern Europe during the Last Interglacial

PC Tzedakis, RN Drysdale, V Margari, LC Skinner, L Menviel, RH Rhodes, AS Taschetto, DA Hodell, SJ Crowhurst, JC Hellstrom, AE Fallick, JO Grimalt, JF McManus, B Martrat, Z Mokeddem, F Parrenin, E Regattieri, K Roe, G Zanchetta

Nature Communications | NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP | Published : 2018

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06683-3

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Abstract

Considerable ambiguity remains over the extent and nature of millennial/centennial-scale climate instability during the Last Interglacial (LIG). Here we analyse marine and terrestrial proxies from a deep-sea sediment sequence on the Portuguese Margin and combine results with an intensively dated Italian speleothem record and climate-model experiments. The strongest expression of climate variability occurred during the transitions into and out of the LIG. Our records also document a series of multi-centennial intra-interglacial arid events in southern Europe, coherent with cold water-mass expansions in the North Atlantic. The spatial and temporal fingerprints of these changes indicate a reorg..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Russell Drysdale Author

John Hellstrom Author

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Funding Acknowledgements

We thank A. Scrivner and C. Walmsley for assistance with foraminifer sample preparation and J. Rolfe and I. Mather for technical assistance with stable isotope measurements, M. Maslin and D. Thornalley for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript, A. Carlson and E. Galaasen for discussions and E. Galaasen and N. Irvali for providing the MD03-2664 data. V.M., K.R., L.C.S. and P.C.T. acknowledge support for the MD01-2444 study from UK-NERC project NE/G00756X/1 (to P.C.T. and L.C.S.). R.N.D., L.C.S., E.R., G.Z. and P.C.T. acknowledge support from Australian Research Council grant DP160102969 (to R.N.D.). L.M. acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council grant DE150100107. A.S.T. and J.H. are supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC). The numerical experiments were undertaken on the NCI National Facility at the ANU, Australia. B.M. acknowledges support from the CSIC-Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral programme RYC-2013-14073. We wish to acknowledge use of the Ferret program for generating the maps in Fig. 6 and Supplementary Figure 6 in this paper. Ferret is a product of NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (information is available at http://ferret.pmel.noaa.gov/Ferret/). This paper is a contribution to the PAGES Working Group on Quaternary Interglacials (QUIGS).