Do paleoclimate proxies agree? A test comparing 19 late Holocene climate and sea‐ice reconstructions from Icelandic marine and lake sediments

Abstract

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Multidecadal to millennial marine climate oscillations across the Denmark Strait (~ 66° N) over the last 2000 cal yr BP

“…Calcite is a major component of the sediment and reflects significant biological productivity (Stefansson and Olafsson, 1991). In Axford et al (2011) it was shown that quartz and the sea-ice biomarker IP25 have values close to the detection limits.…”

“…A 15 yr equi-spaced integrated time series was generated for 2322 data using AnalySeries (Paillard et al, 1996). Figure 8a graphs the PC 1 scores from the Iceland marine data set (Axford et al, 2011) versus the calcite wt% from 2322. The 2322 calcite data parallel the lower-resolution PC scores, suggesting a broadly parallel climate evolution on both sides of the Denmark Strait, in keeping with the climate data for the last 100-150 yr (Fig.…”

“…8c). (Axford et al, 2011) versus the smoothed (5-point average) weight% calcite (blue) from the combined HU93030-019B and MD99-2322; (B) 15 yr calcite wt% (blue) and regime shift mean values versus the radiocarbon calibrated probability distribution for Baffin Island vegetation (Miller et al, 2012) (red); (C) quartz wt% (grey line with filled circles), regime shifts (black line) and the trend (heavy grey line). been presented at 250 and 100 yr resolution (Andrews, 2009;Andrews et al, 2009b).…”

“…2c) whereas in most paleoceanographic records the sampling resolution is decadal at best, hence we should talk about NAO/AO-like intervals. Several recent papers have focused on conditions along the Iceland shelf over the last 1000-2000 cal yr BP using a variety of proxies (Andrews et al, 2009a;Axford et al, 2011;Jennings et al, 2001;Knudsen et al, 2004;Masse et al, 2008;Sicre et al, 2008), but there has been little effort to compare the proxies across the Denmark Strait (Jennings et al, 2002a;Andresen et al, 2013). The goal of this paper is to present proxy data from four areas, namely East Greenland fjord mouths, East Greenland mid-shelf, NW/N Iceland, and SW Iceland (Fig.…”

“…SW Iceland is always under the influence of the IC and is only very rarely affected by sea ice. SW Iceland shelf sediments contain little or no quartz, no presence of the sea-ice biomarker IP25 (Belt et al, 2007), and have high carbonate content (Axford et al, 2011). The opposite end member is represented by the inner NE Greenland shelf, which is always influenced by the East Greenland current (EGC) and extensive landfast and drifting sea ice (Reeh, 2004).…”