| Summary: | The last deglaciation (Termination I, T-I) was the most recent global-scale climate transition. It involved a drastic temperature increase guiding massive melting of ice sheets, with a concurrent reorganization of inter- and intrahemispherical atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns. T-I lasted ~3.0 ka (ka = kiloyears before present) in Greenland (NGRIP, 2007), although it was not a linear process. A rapid temperature increase at 14.6±0.3 ka (Bølling-Allerød, BA) was followed by a return towards glacial-like conditions (12.2±0.3 ka, Younger Dryas, YD), before the last warming that led to the Holocene (11.7±0.1 ka). Other secondary climate oscillations characterized T-I too (Cheng et al., 2020). Some of these intra-deglaciation global warmings were particularly rapid, at times occurring at centennial or even decadal timescale. This provides an interesting comparison with the current climate change. Yet, it is not clear how T-I-related dynamics occurring at the polar regions and/or in the oceans impacted terrestrial environment at mid latitudes, in terms of rainfall and temperature variation and related environmental and ecological changes. This is especially true for the Mediterranean area, considering that its climate is connected – and controlled – by processes occurring in the Atlantic and Arctic. In Italy, T-I records of adequate chronological resolution are virtually absent. We here present a novel speleothem record from Sant’Angelo Cave (SA1, Ostuni, Apulia) spanning from 47.7±0.1 to 8.9±0.9 ka. In the period from ~20 to ~10 ka, multiple U-Th datings (n=22) resulted in a final age model with an average uncertainty of <0.3 ka and a resolution of ~25 years. Climate proxies (δ18O, n=1045) were anchored to this chronology. The reliability of SA1-δ18O in recording palaeoclimate information was ascertained by a statistically grounded inter-cave replication test with a recently published speleothem record from a nearby site (Columbu et al., 2020). The interpretation of SA1 allows to: 1) accurately and ...
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