Were last glacial climate events simultaneous between Greenland and western Europe?

• Main Authors: Blaauw, M., Wohlfarth, B., Christen, J. A., Ampel, L., Veres, D., Hughen, K. A., Preusser, F., Svensson, A.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Greenland; Dansgaard-Oeschger events; Greenland ice cores; Ice cap
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/cpd-4-1203-2008; https://cp.copernicus.org/preprints/cpd-2008-0046/

During the last glacial period, several large abrupt climate fluctuations took place on the Greenland ice cap and elsewhere. Often these Dansgaard/Oeschger events are assumed to have been synchronous, and then used as tie-points to link chronologies between the proxy archives. However, if temporally separate events are lumped into one illusionary event, climatic interpretations of the tuned events will obviously be flawed. Here, we compare Dansgaard/Oeschger-type events in a well-dated record from south-eastern France with those in Greenland ice cores. Instead of assuming simultaneous climate events between both archives, we keep their age models independent. Even these well-dated archives possess large chronological uncertainties, that prevent us from inferring synchronous climate events at decadal to multi-centennial time scales. If possible, tuning of proxy archives should be avoided.