Western Mediterranean Climate Response to Dansgaard/Oeschger Events: New Insights From Speleothem Records
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...
| Published in: | Geophysical Research Letters |
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| Main Authors: | , , |
| Format: | Text |
| Language: | unknown |
| Published: |
Digital Commons @ University of South Florida
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/kip_articles/5901 https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL084009 |
| Summary: | 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. |
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