| Summary: | High-latitude environments of the Southern Hemisphere represent key areas in which to carry out palaeoclimatic studies because they are sensitive to climate change and still little affected by anthropogenic pollution. From this point of view, the Antarctic continental margin and Polar front zone are particularly interesting regions, although both environments exhibit inherent limitations. During glacial periods, grounded ice sheets largely occupied Antarctic continental shelves and prevented the preservation of complete and undisturbed marine sedimentary sequences. Furthermore, sediment accumulation rates are generally very low in open ocean areas (Giglio et al., 2002; Anderson et al., 2002), reducing the time resolution of palaeoclimatic reconstructions. Late Pleistocene climatic variability seems to have produced the changes in sedimentological, compositional and magnetic mineralogy recorded in deep-sea sediments of the Pacific margin of the Antarctic Peninsula (Lucchi et al., 2002; Sagnotti et al., 2001). The climatic history of this area can be reconstructed with high time resolution (millennial scale) through the integrated analysis of these changes, and results can be correlated with other areas. This paper presents integrated sedimentological and geochemical data from a box core collected south of the Polar Front (Fig. 1) in order to investigate palaeoenvironmental changes which affected this sector of the Southern Ocean during the last deglacial-Holocene time interval.
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