Fluvial response to the last Holocene rapid climate change in the Northwestern Mediterranean coastlands

Discovery of a tsunami deposit from the Bronze Age Santorini eruption at Malia (Crete): impact, chronology, extension

“…Ti is considered as a proxy of terrigenous silicate input as it is strictly of terrigenous origin. It is mainly present in clay minerals while Zr ranks among heavy minerals and is more often associated with coarser silt and sand-size fractions 51,52 related to high-energy environments 53 and coastal sandy deposits 54 . We used the Zr/Ti ratio as a grain size proxy to identify less visible changes in the sedimentation process and potential coastal input.…”

A new interpolation method to measure delta evolution and sediment flux: Application to the late Holocene coastal plain of the Argens River in the western Mediterranean

“…Geochemical analyses of sediments may provide information about the degree of salinity in subaqueous depositional environment from coastal or lacustrine areas: high (low) values of S, Cl and Sr can evidence brackish (freshwater) conditions (Lopez-Buendia et al, 1999;Chagué-Goff et al, 2002;Schofield et al, 2010;Moreno et al, 2012;Haenssler et al, 2013;Degeai et al 2015Degeai et al , 2017. Moreover, the bulk of sulphur in coastal lakes can reflect the organic content of a sediment as a function of primary productivity in the water column (Striewski et al, 2009;Haenssler et al, 2013).…”

“…Besides, an increase in Si, K and Rb is generally associated with riverine input in the western Mediterranean (Frigola et al, 2007;Martin-Puertas et al, 2010Nieto-Moreno et al, 2011Rodrigo-Gamiz et al, 2011Moreno et al, 2012;Martinez-Ruiz et al, 2015;Degeai et al, 2017). Elemental concentrations of coastal sediments from the western Mediterranean are usually normalized to Al to minimize matrix effects (Dezileau et al, 2011(Dezileau et al, , 2016Sabatier et al, 2012).…”

“…In the western Mediterranean, the vulnerability of Holocene coastal landscape increased in response to rapid climate change characterized by pervasive millennial-scale variability as well as decadal-to centennial-scale abrupt transitions Fletcher and Zielhofer, 2013;Melis et al, 2018). These rapid climate changes occurred during cooling events characterized by high storm activity and flood frequency, which led to an increased fluvial and coastal sediment supply (Dezileau et al, 2011(Dezileau et al, , 2016Sabatier et al, 2012;Fletcher and Zielhofer, 2013;Degeai et al, 2015Degeai et al, , 2017. These episodes of intense storm activity and high flood frequency could have been caused by changes in atmospheric circulation patterns such as the North Atlantic oscillation (NAO) or the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) (Benito et al, 2015a(Benito et al, , 2015bGoudeau et al, 2015;Dezileau et al, 2016;Sanchez-Lopez et al, 2016;Degeai et al, 2017).…”

“…For instance, a southward shift of the North Atlantic westerlies and storm tracks related to the negative phase of the NAO was associated with cooler and wetter climatic conditions in southwestern Europe during the Little Ice Age (Nieto- Moreno et al, , 2013aMoreno et al, , 2013bTrouet et al, 2012;Wirth et al, 2013;Goudeau et al, 2014Goudeau et al, , 2015Sanchez-Lopez et al, 2016). An increase in riverine flooding and fluvial activity occurred at this time (Macklin et al, 2006;Benito et al, 2015a;Degeai et al, 2017), which led to higher inputs of terrigenous material in the marine sediments of the western Mediterranean basin (Frigola et al, 2007;Nieto-Moreno et al, 2011Goudeau et al, 2014Goudeau et al, , 2015Jalali et al, 2016).…”