The spatio-temporal structure of the Lateglacial to early Holocene transition reconstructed from the pollen record of Lake Suigetsu and its precise correlation with other key global archives: Implications for palaeoclimatology and archaeology

Synchronous vegetation response to the last glacial-interglacial transition in northwest Europe

“…Five of the tephra layers could be reliably correlated to known eruptions with published independent age estimates established from radiocarbon dating programmes at other sites, which were here updated using the IntCal20 calibration curve 29 (Supplementary Table 2; Supplementary Methods 1). Five samples were selected for AMS 14 C dating from those parts of the Hämelsee record where no tephra horizons were available. Organic material reflecting atmospheric 14 C concentrations such as seeds and fruits from terrestrial plants were hand-picked from the residue left after sieving, and dated in the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (Supplementary Table 2).…”

“…Five samples were selected for AMS 14 C dating from those parts of the Hämelsee record where no tephra horizons were available. Organic material reflecting atmospheric 14 C concentrations such as seeds and fruits from terrestrial plants were hand-picked from the residue left after sieving, and dated in the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (Supplementary Table 2). A varve chronology has been established for an annually laminated sediment interval (1610-1524 cm sediment depth) based on counting and sub-layer thickness measurements on 10-cm-long thin sections using a petrographic microscope.…”

“…However, our understanding of the timing of regional LGIT ecosystem response to climate change is hampered by chronological uncertainties in many of the available terrestrial sediment archives 13 . As an example, even the Lake Suigetsu record from Japan, which has a high-resolution radiocarbon dating strategy based on terrestrial plant macrofossils encased in varved sediments, shows 2-sigma dating uncertainties in the order of ±50 years 14 . Multi-decadal uncertainties preclude the assessment of regional leads and lags in ecosystem response as these can occur on a (sub-) decadal scale 15,16 .…”

“…As a result of these dating uncertainties, conflicting theories exist as to when and how fast ecosystems responded to climate change at the onset of the YD. For instance, evidence from Europe 12 and Japan 14 suggests that vegetation and climate change occurred synchronously across large parts of the globe, within centennial-scale dating uncertainties. By contrast, other studies suggest centennial-scale off-sets between vegetation change in Europe and variations in the Greenland oxygen isotope records 19 or provide evidence for a time-transgressive palynological shift on a N-S gradient across northwest Europe at the onset of the YD 13 .…”

A multi-ice-core, annual-layer-counted Greenland ice-core chronology for the last 3800 years: GICC21

“…In the Holocene, recent studies investigated the comprehensive impact of volcanic eruptions, suggesting for example a 10-year cooling in European summer temperatures (Sigl et al, 2015) or a 5-year positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) (Sjolte et al, 2018), both observed after tropical eruptions. Other examples of such inter-regional comparative studies, dependent on timescale accuracy, are the study of bipolar timing of climate changes in the last glacial (WAIS Divide Project Members, 2015;Pedro et al, 2018;Svensson et al, 2020) or the relative timing of the Holocene onset over Greenland and Asia (Nakagawa et al, 2021).…”