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Abstract. We 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 warmwater lakes thought of have formed in the Late Pleistocene by the damming of the Ob, Yenisei and Lena Rivers.

Abstract. 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 R = 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.

This investigation is based on a study of two pale-oclimatic curves obtained in the Urals (51-59 • N, 58-61 • E): i) a ground surface temperature history (GSTH) reconstruction since 800 A.D. and ii) meteorological data for the last 170 years. Temperature anomalies measured in 49 boreholes were used for the GSTH reconstruction. It is shown that a traditional averaging of the histories leads to the lowest estimates of amplitude of past temperature fluctuations. The interval estimates method, accounting separately for the rock's thermal diffusivity variations and the influence of a number of non-climatic causes, was used to obtain the average GSTH.