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

Abstract 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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geophysical Research Letters
Main Authors: Alexander Budsky, Jasper A. Wassenburg, Regina Mertz‐Kraus, Christoph Spötl, Klaus Peter Jochum, Luis Gibert, Denis Scholz
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2019-08-01
Subjects:
Spain
last glacial
Dansgaard/Oeschger
speleothem
Marine Isotope Stage 3
western Mediterranean climate
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL084009
Description
Summary:Abstract 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.
ISSN:0094-8276
1944-8007

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