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| Titel |
Comparison of a spatio-temporal speleothem-based reconstruction of late Holocene climate variability to the timing of cultural developments |
| VerfasserIn |
Michael Deininger, Jörg Lippold, Florian Abele, Frank McDermott |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2016
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
en
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 18 (2016) |
| Datensatznummer |
250129923
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2016-10098.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Speleothems are considered as a valuable continental climate archive. Their δ18O records
provide information onto past changes of the atmospheric circulation accompanied by
changes in surface air temperature and precipitation. During the last decades European
speleothem studies have assembled a European speleothem network (including numerous
speleothem δ18O records) that allow now not only to picture past climate variability in time
but also in space. In particular the climate variability of the last 4.5 ka was investigated by
these studies. This allows the comparison of the speleothem-based reconstructed
palaeoclimate with the timings of the rise and fall of ancient civilisations in this period –
including the Dark Ages.
Here we evaluate a compilation of 10 speleothem δ18O records covering the last 4.5 ka using
a Monte Carlo based Principal Component Analysis (MC-PCA) that accounts for
uncertainties in individual speleothem age models and for the different and varying
temporal resolutions of each speleothem δ18O record. Our MC-PCA approach
allows not only the identification of temporally coherent changes in δ18O records,
i.e. the common signal in all investigated speleothem δ18O records, but it also
facilitates their depiction and evaluation spatially. The speleothem δ18O records are
spanning almost the entire European continent ranging from the western Margin of the
European continent to Northern Turkey and from Northern Italy to Norway. For the
MC-PCA analysis the 4.5 ka are divided into eight 1ka long time windows that
overlap the subsequent time window by 500 years to allow a comparison of the
spatio-temporal evolution of the common signal. For every single time window we derive a
common mode of climate variability of all speleothem δ18O records as well as its
spatial extent. This allows us to compare the rise and fall of ancient civilisations,
like the Hittite and the Roman Empire, with our reconstructed spatio-temporal
record. |
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