Abstract. Several climate events have been reported from the Early Holocene superepoch, the best known of these being the Preboreal oscillation (PBO). It is still unclear how the PBO and the number of climate events observed in Greenland ice cores and European terrestrial records are related to one another. This is mainly due to uncertainties in the chronologies of the records. Here, we present new high resolution 10Be concentration data from the varved Meerfelder Maar sediment record in Germany, spanning the period 11310–11000 years BP. These new data allow us to synchronize this well-studied record as well as Greenland ice-core records to the IntCal13 time-scale via radionuclide wiggle-matching. In doing so, we show that the climate oscillations identified in Greenland and Europe between 11450 and 11000 years BP were not synchronous but terminated and began, respectively, with the onset of a grand solar minimum. A similar spatial anomaly pattern is found in a number of modeling studies on solar forcing of climate in the North Atlantic region. We further postulate that freshwater delivery to the North Atlantic would have had the potential to amplify solar forcing through a slowdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) reinforcing surface air temperature anomalies in the region.
Patterns of millennial variability over the last 500 ka