| The North Atlantic INTIMATE (INtegration of Ice-core, MArine and TErrestrial records)
group has previously recommended an Event Stratigraphy approach for the synchronisation
of records of the Last Termination using the Greenland ice core records as the regional
stratotypes.
A key element of these protocols has been the formal definition of numbered Greenland
Stadials (GS) and Greenland Interstadials (GI) within the past glacial period as the Greenland
expressions of the characteristic Dansgaard-Oeschger events that represent cold and warm
phases of the North Atlantic region, respectively. Using a recent synchronization of the
NGRIP, GRIP, and GISP2 ice cores that allows the parallel analysis of all three records on a
common time scale, we here present an extension of the GS/GI stratigraphic template to the
entire glacial period. In addition to the well-known sequence of Dansgaard-Oeschger events
that were first defined and numbered in the ice core records more than two decades
ago, a number of short-lived climatic oscillations have been identified in the three
synchronized records. Some of these events have been observed in other studies, but we
here propose a consistent scheme for discriminating and naming all the significant
climatic events of the last glacial period that are represented in the Greenland ice
cores.
In addition to presenting the updated event stratigraphy, we make a series of
recommendations on how to refer to these periods in a way that promotes unambiguous
comparison and correlation between different proxy records, providing a more
secure basis for investigating the dynamics and fundamental causes of these climatic
perturbations.
The work presented is a part of a manuscript under review for publication in Quaternary
Science Reviews. Author team: S.O. Rasmussen, M. Bigler, S.P.E. Blockley, T. Blunier, S.L.
Buchardt, H.B. Clausen†, I. Cvijanovic, D. Dahl-Jensen, S.J. Johnsen†, H. Fischer, V. Gkinis,
M. Guillevic, W.Z. Hoek, J.J. Lowe, J. Pedro, T. Popp, I.K. Seierstad, J.P. Steffensen, A.M.
Svensson, P. Vallelonga, B.M. Vinther, M.J.C. Walker, J.J. Wheatley, and M. Winstrup
(†:deceased). |