Western Mediterranean Climate Response to Dansgaard/Oeschger Events: New Insights From Speleothem Records

• Main Authors: Budsky, Alexander, Wassenburg, Jasper A., Mertz-Kraus, Regina, Spötl, Christoph, Jochum, Klaus Peter, Gibert, Luis, Scholz, Denis
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: FID GEO 2019
• Subjects: Greenland; Dansgaard-Oeschger events
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.23689/fidgeo-4801; https://e-docs.geo-leo.de/handle/11858/9147

The climate of the western Mediterranean was characterized by a strong precipitation gradient during the Holocene driven by atmospheric circulation patterns. The scarcity of terrestrial paleoclimate archives has precluded exploring this hydroclimate pattern during Marine Isotope Stages 5 to 3. Here we present stable carbon and oxygen isotope records from three flowstones from southeast Iberia, which show that Dansgaard/Oeschger events were associated with more humid conditions. This is in agreement with other records from the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean, and western Europe, which all responded in a similar way to millennial-scale climate variability in Greenland. This general increase in precipitation during Dansgaard/Oeschger events cannot be explained by any present-day or Holocene winter atmospheric circulation pattern. Instead, we suggest that changes in sea surface temperature played a dominant role in determining precipitation amounts in the western Mediterranean.