Spatial distribution of Pleistocene/Holocene warming amplitudes in Northern Eurasia inferred from geothermal data

International audienceWe analyze 48 geothermal estimates of Pleistocene/Holocene warming amplitudes from various locations in Greenland, Europe, Arctic regions of Western Siberia, and Yakutia. The spatial distribution of these estimates exhibits two remarkable features. (i) In Europe and part of Asia the amplitude of warming increases toward the northwest and displays clear asymmetry with respect to the North Pole. The region of maximal warming is close to the North Atlantic. A simple parametric dependence of the warming amplitudes on the distance to the warming center explains 91% of the amplitude variation. The Pleistocene/Holocene warming center is located northeast of Iceland. We claim that the Holocene warming is primarily related to the formation (or resumption) of the modern system of currents in the North Atlantic. (ii) In Arctic Asia, north of the 68-th parallel, the amplitude of temperature change sharply decreases from South to North, reaching zero and even negative values. These small or negative amplitudes could be attributed partially to a joint influence of Late Pleistocene ice sheets. Using a simple model of the temperature regime underneath the ice sheet we show that, depending on the relationship between the heat flow and the vertical ice advection velocity, the base of the glacier can either warm up or cool down. Nevertheless, we speculate that the more likely explanation of these observations are warm-water lakes thought of have formed in the Late Pleistocene by the damming of the Ob, Yenisei and Lena Rivers

Surface temperature trends in Russia over the past five centuries reconstructed from borehole temperatures

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94976/1/jgrb13614.pd

Data Descriptor: A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era

Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records are from trees, ice, sediment, corals, speleothems, documentary evidence, and other archives. They range in length from 50 to 2000 years, with a median of 547 years, while temporal resolution ranges from biweekly to centennial. Nearly half of the proxy time series are significantly correlated with HadCRUT4.2 surface temperature over the period 1850-2014. Global temperature composites show a remarkable degree of coherence between high-and low-resolution archives, with broadly similar patterns across archive types, terrestrial versus marine locations, and screening criteria. The database is suited to investigations of global and regional temperature variability over the Common Era, and is shared in the Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format, including serializations in Matlab, R and Python.(TABLE)Since the pioneering work of D'Arrigo and Jacoby1-3, as well as Mann et al. 4,5, temperature reconstructions of the Common Era have become a key component of climate assessments6-9. Such reconstructions depend strongly on the composition of the underlying network of climate proxies10, and it is therefore critical for the climate community to have access to a community-vetted, quality-controlled database of temperature-sensitive records stored in a self-describing format. The Past Global Changes (PAGES) 2k consortium, a self-organized, international group of experts, recently assembled such a database, and used it to reconstruct surface temperature over continental-scale regions11 (hereafter, ` PAGES2k-2013').This data descriptor presents version 2.0.0 of the PAGES2k proxy temperature database (Data Citation 1). It augments the PAGES2k-2013 collection of terrestrial records with marine records assembled by the Ocean2k working group at centennial12 and annual13 time scales. In addition to these previously published data compilations, this version includes substantially more records, extensive new metadata, and validation. Furthermore, the selection criteria for records included in this version are applied more uniformly and transparently across regions, resulting in a more cohesive data product.This data descriptor describes the contents of the database, the criteria for inclusion, and quantifies the relation of each record with instrumental temperature. In addition, the paleotemperature time series are summarized as composites to highlight the most salient decadal-to centennial-scale behaviour of the dataset and check mutual consistency between paleoclimate archives. We provide extensive Matlab code to probe the database-processing, filtering and aggregating it in various ways to investigate temperature variability over the Common Era. The unique approach to data stewardship and code-sharing employed here is designed to enable an unprecedented scale of investigation of the temperature history of the Common Era, by the scientific community and citizen-scientists alike

Late Pleistocene–Holocene ground surface heat flux changes reconstructed from borehole temperature data (the Urals, Russia)

We use geothermal reconstruction of the ground surface temperature (GST) history early obtained in the Middle Urals to determine the surface heat flux (SHF) history over the past 35 kyr. A new algorithm of GST–SHF transformation was applied to solve this problem. The timescale of geothermal reconstructions has been corrected by comparing the estimated heat flux and annual insolation at the latitude of 60° N. The consistency of SHF and insolation changes on the interval 35–6 kyr BP with the linear correlation coefficient <i>R</i> = 0.99 points to orbital factors as the main cause of climatic changes during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition. The amplitude of SHF variations is about 1.3% of the insolation change amplitude. The increase of carbon dioxide concentrations lagged by 2–3 kyr from the SHF increase and occurred synchronously with GST changes