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

• Published in: Geophysical Research Letters
• Main Authors: Budsky, A., Wassenburg, J., Mertz-Kraus, R., Spoetl, C., Jochum, K., Gibert, L., Scholz, D.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Greenland; Dansgaard-Oeschger events
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0004-CD34-B

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.