Climate Proxies | ScienceGate

Archival records and historical documents offer direct observation of weather and atmospheric conditions and have the highest temporal and spatial resolution, and precise dating, of the available climate proxies. They also provide information about variables such as temperature, precipitation and climate extremes, as well as floods, droughts and storms. The present work studied Arab-Islamic documentary sources covering the western Mediterranean region (documents written by Arab-Islamic historians that narrate social, political and religious history) available for the period AD 680–1815. They mostly provide information on hydrometeorological events. In Iberia the most intense droughts were reported during AD 747–753, AD 814–822, AD 846–847, AD 867–874 and AD 914–915 and in the Maghreb AD 867–873, AD 898–915, AD 1104–1147, AD 1280–1340 and AD 1720–1815 had prevalent drought conditions. Intense rain episodes are also reported.

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Accurate dating of stalagmites from low seasonal contrast tropical Pacific climate using Sr 2D maps, fabrics and annual hydrological cycles

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-021-81941-x ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Mohammadali Faraji ◽

Andrea Borsato ◽

Silvia Frisia ◽

John C. Hellstrom ◽

Andrew Lorrey ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Principal Component ◽

Tropical Pacific ◽

In Situ Monitoring ◽

Marine Aerosols ◽

Icp Ms ◽

Optical Maps ◽

Hydrological Cycles ◽

Climate Proxies ◽

Dimensional Mapping

AbstractTropical Pacific stalagmites are commonly affected by dating uncertainties because of their low U concentration and/or elevated initial 230Th content. This poses problems in establishing reliable trends and periodicities for droughts and pluvial episodes in a region vulnerable to climate change. Here we constrain the chronology of a Cook Islands stalagmite using synchrotron µXRF two-dimensional mapping of Sr concentrations coupled with growth laminae optical imaging constrained by in situ monitoring. Unidimensional LA-ICP-MS-generated Mg, Sr, Ba and Na variability series were anchored to the 2D Sr and optical maps. The annual hydrological significance of Mg, Sr, Ba and Na was tested by principal component analysis, which revealed that Mg and Na are related to dry-season, wind-transported marine aerosols, similar to the host-rock derived Sr and Ba signatures. Trace element annual banding was then used to generate a calendar-year master chronology with a dating uncertainty maximum of ± 15 years over 336 years. Our approach demonstrates that accurate chronologies and coupled hydroclimate proxies can be obtained from speleothems formed in tropical settings where low seasonality and problematic U–Th dating would discourage the use of high-resolution climate proxies datasets.

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Ancient oak climate proxies from the agricultural heartland

Eos ◽

10.1029/2004eo460003 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 85 (46) ◽

pp. 483 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Richard P. Guyette ◽

Michael C. Stambaugh ◽

Daniel C. Dey

Keyword(s):

Climate Proxies

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PAIRED SUB-ANNUAL BIOMARKER AND ELEMENTAL CLIMATE PROXIES REVEAL MONTHS OF CLIMATE SIGNAL INTEGRATION IN THE ARABIAN SEA

10.3997/2214-4609.202134135 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

T. Napier ◽

L. Wörmer ◽

J. Wendt ◽

A. Lückge ◽

K. Hinrichs

Keyword(s):

Arabian Sea ◽

Signal Integration ◽

Climate Signal ◽

Climate Proxies

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Ancient trash mounds unravel urban collapse a century before the end of Byzantine hegemony in the southern Levant

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ◽

10.1073/pnas.1900233116 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 116 (17) ◽

pp. 8239-8248 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Guy Bar-Oz ◽

Lior Weissbrod ◽

Tali Erickson-Gini ◽

Yotam Tepper ◽

Dan Malkinson ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Ice Age ◽

Sixth Century ◽

Late Antique ◽

Ceramic Analysis ◽

Time Space ◽

Wide Scale ◽

Space Dynamics ◽

High Level ◽

The City ◽

Climate Proxies

The historic event of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified in dozens of natural and geological climate proxies of the northern hemisphere. Although this climatic downturn was proposed as a major cause for pandemic and extensive societal upheavals in the sixth–seventh centuries CE, archaeological evidence for the magnitude of societal response to this event is sparse. This study uses ancient trash mounds as a type of proxy for identifying societal crisis in the urban domain, and employs multidisciplinary investigations to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale. Survey, excavation, sediment analysis, and geographic information system assessment of mound volume were conducted on a series of mounds surrounding the Byzantine urban settlement of Elusa in the Negev Desert. These reveal the massive collection and dumping of domestic and construction waste over time on the city edges. Carbon dating of charred seeds and charcoal fragments combined with ceramic analysis establish the end date of orchestrated trash removal near the mid-sixth century, coinciding closely with the beginning of the LALIA event and outbreak of the Justinian Plague in the year 541. This evidence for societal decline during the sixth century ties with other arguments for urban dysfunction across the Byzantine Levant at this time. We demonstrate the utility of trash mounds as sensitive proxies of social response and unravel the time–space dynamics of urban collapse, suggesting diminished resilience to rapid climate change in the frontier Negev region of the empire.

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Connecting Modern Soil and Paleosol Communities: Improving Climate Proxies and Our Understanding of Earth's Critical Zone

CSA News ◽

10.2134/csa2014-59-10-10 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 59 (10) ◽

pp. 24-25

Author(s):

Steven G. Driese ◽

Michael H. Young ◽

Eric C. Brevik

Keyword(s):

Critical Zone ◽

Modern Soil ◽

Climate Proxies ◽

Earth’S Critical Zone

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Mismatches of scale in the application of paleoclimatic research to Chinese archaeology

Quaternary Research ◽

10.1017/qua.2020.60 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-20

Author(s):

Yitzchak Y. Jaffe ◽

Lorenzo Castellano ◽

Gideon Shelach-Lavi ◽

Roderick B. Campbell

Keyword(s):

Causal Mechanism ◽

Central Plains ◽

Sociopolitical Change ◽

Archaeological Data ◽

The Past ◽

Multiple Regions ◽

Widespread Belief ◽

The Many ◽

Climate Proxies ◽

Neolithic Cultures

Abstract Issues surrounding the difficult task of correlating archaeological and climatic trajectories are directly impacting the study of human-environmental interaction in Ancient China. We have chosen to focus on the 4.2 ka BP event due to the widespread belief in recent Chinese archaeological publications that it brought about the collapse of Neolithic cultures in multiple regions of China. Following a literature review concerning the many issues surrounding the reconstruction of the 4.2 ka BP event in East Asia, we present three short case studies from the Lower Yangzi, the Shaanxi loess plateau, and the Central Plains detailing a number of problems with Chinese archaeological attempts at using climate change as a causal mechanism for sociopolitical change. We then focus on a common but highly problematic methodology—the growing use of archaeological data compiled in the Atlas of Chinese Cultural Relics to correlate with climate proxies in order to generate linear, causal models explaining sociopolitical collapse. We follow with an example from Northeast China, where work from the past three decades has provided ample data with which to begin answering these questions in a more productive manner, and end with a set of suggestions for archaeologists and climate scientists going forward.

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