Vegetation responses to abrupt climatic changes during the Last Interglacial Complex (Marine Isotope Stage 5) at Tenaghi Philippon, NE Greece

• Published in: Quaternary Science Reviews
• Main Authors: Milner, A. M., Roucoux, K. H., Collier, R. E. L., Müller, U. C., Pross, J., Tzedakis, P. C.
• Other Authors: University of St Andrews. School of Geography & Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews. Geography & Sustainable Development
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Abrupt climate change; Mediterranean region; Palaeoclimate; Last Interglacial Complex; Eemian; Early Glacial; Weichselian; Pollen; Greece; G Geography (General); GE Environmental Sciences; NDAS; BDC; R2C; SDG 13 - Climate Action; SDG 14 - Life Below Water; SDG 15 - Life on Land; G1; GE; Greenland; Greenland ice core; ice core; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10023/12137; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2016.10.016; https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1537283

This work was supported by the Earth and Biosphere Institute, University of Leeds and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The discovery that climate variability during the Last Glacial shifted rapidly between climate states has intensified efforts to understand the distribution, timing and impact of abrupt climate change under a wide range of boundary conditions. In contribution to this, we investigate the nature of abrupt environmental changes in terrestrial settings of the Mediterranean region during the Last Interglacial Complex (Marine Isotope Stage [MIS] 5) and explore the relationships of these changes to high-latitude climate events. We present a new, temporally highly resolved (mean: 170 years) pollen record for the Last Interglacial Complex from Tenaghi Philippon, north-east Greece. The new pollen record, which spans the interval from 130,000 to 65,000 years ago, forms part of an exceptionally long polleniferous sediment archive covering the last 1.35 million years. The pollen data reveal an interglacial followed by alternating forest and steppe phases representing the interstadials and stadials of the Early Glacial. Superimposed on these millennial-scale changes is evidence of persistent sub-millennial-scale variability. We identify ten high-amplitude abrupt events in the pollen record, characterised by rapid contractions of closed forest to open steppe environment and interpreted to indicate major changes in moisture availability and temperature. The contractions in forest cover on millennial timescales appear associated with cooling events in the Mediterranean Sea, North Atlantic and Greenland regions, linked to the Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) cycles of the Early Glacial. On sub-millennial timescales, the pattern of changes in forest cover at Tenaghi Philippon display a structure similar to the pattern of short-lived precursor and rebound-type events detected in the Greenland ice-core record. Our findings indicate that persistent, high-amplitude environmental variability occurred throughout the Early ...