Muted multidecadal climate variability in central Europe during cold stadial periods

Thresholds for the presence of glacial megafauna in central Europe during the last 60,000 years

“…Regional climate signals, however, are difficult to compare between records, especially since 14 C dating for the early MIS3 is problematic. The annually continuous ELSA-20 C org (chlorins) record from Auel and Holzmaar is at the moment the only record in central Europe to cover both MIS3 and MIS2 and is in addition fully correlated with the Greenland GICC05 chronology 1 . Here, we use these continuous and undisturbed maar lake sediments to document the presence/absence of megafauna and its relation to climatic, environmental change, human hunting pressure and volcanism.…”

“…It has a total of more than 250 volcanic structures including 68 maar lakes (60 of which are infilled lakes), which makes it an ideal research field to study the relationships between climate, volcanism, vegetation, landscape and ecology. The sediment cores studied here were drilled by the ELSA-Project, which has systematically cored all accessible Eifel maar sites, lakes and infilled maar structures over the recent years 1 – 4 , see more information on all ELSA cores on the webseite www.ELSA-Project.de . We use cores from the Holocene maar lake of Holzmaar and the infilled Pleistocene maar lake of Auel, both of which have a similar landscape structure with riverine inflow from catchments of about 5 km length (Fig.…”

“…Sirocko et al 1 recently have presented the stratigraphy for those records – the ELSA-20 time series of C org (chlorins) 1 , reproduced in Figs. 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 .…”

Scanning Hyperspectral Imaging for In Situ Biogeochemical Analysis of Lake Sediment Cores: Review of Recent Developments

“…Most recently, it was demonstrated that in maar lakes from the Eifel region of Germany, the RABD 660;670 index measured by a Spectrolino device could successfully track paleoproductivity back to 60,000 years, showing how rapid temperature changes in the North Atlantic/Greenland domain (i.e., Dansgaard–Oeschger cycles) impacted lake productivity in continental Europe [ 39 ].…”

“…Maximal absorbance typically occurs between 660–675 nm, depending on the portions of chlorophyll a and b and various derivatives (e.g., pheophytin a , pheophorbide a ), as well as the spectral properties of the sediment matrix. RABD 670 (or similar) has been widely used as an index of green pigments and as a proxy for aquatic productivity in a wide variety of environments, including marine [ 9 , 23 ] and lake sediments [ 27 , 36 , 37 , 39 , 63 , 64 ], and over timespans greater than 100,000 years [ 65 ]. A modified version of the RABD Formula (2) flexibly utilizes the wavelength associated with maximal absorbance, which is preferable for reconstructions of total algal production [ 14 , 53 , 66 ]: where R λ is the reflectance at the wavelength (λ), R 655–680min is the trough minimum (i.e., lowest reflectance value measured between 655 and 680 nm), X is the number of spectral bands between R 730 and the trough minimum, and Y is the number of spectral bands between the trough minimum and R 590 .…”