Freshwater influx to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea from the melting of the Fennoscandian ice sheet during the last deglaciation

Vadsaria, Tristan; Zaragosi, Sébastien; Ramstein, Gilles; Dutay, Jean-Claude; Li, Laurent; Siani, Giuseppe; Revel, Marie; Obase, Takashi; Abe‐Ouchi, Ayako

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-12055-1

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…It has been suggested that meltwater was routed to the Black and Caspian seas via the Dnieper and Volga rivers during the early phase of deglaciation (e.g. Yanchilina et al, 2019;Aksu et al, 2022;Vadsaria et al, 2022), and it would also be useful to investigate the impact of this on the regional climate.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, we kept records where there is a hiatus but where there are sufficient radiocarbon dates above the hiatus to create an age model for the post-hiatus part of the record. We constructed new age models for all the remaining sites (121) using the IntCal20 calibration curve (Reimer et al, 2020) and the rbacon R package (Blaauw et al, 2021) in the framework of the AgeR R package (Villegas-Diaz et al, 2021). Some of these records have no modern samples, where modern was defined as 0-300 years before present, and thus could not be used to calculate climate anomalies.…”

Section: Fossil Pollen Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Daily values of cloud cover fraction and precipitation were obtained from monthly data in the same way and used to estimate MI, i.e. the ratio of annual precipitation to annual potential evapotranspiration, through the R package smpds (Villegas-Diaz and Harrison, 2022) before converting this to α, following Liu et al (2020). For consistency with the reconstructed time series, climate anomalies for 30-year bins for each land grid cell within the EMBSeCBIO domain were calculated using the interval after 300 years before present as the modern baseline.…”

Section: Climate Model Simulationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pollen-based reconstructions of Holocene climate trends in the eastern Mediterranean region

Cruz-Silva,

Harrison,

Prentice

et al. 2023

Clim. Past

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Abstract. There has been considerable debate about the degree to which climate has driven societal changes in the eastern Mediterranean region, partly through reliance on a limited number of qualitative records of climate changes and partly reflecting the need to disentangle the joint impact of changes in different aspects of climate. Here, we use tolerance-weighted, weighted-averaging partial least squares to derive reconstructions of the mean temperature of the coldest month (MTCO), mean temperature of the warmest month (MTWA), growing degree days above a threshold of 0 ∘C (GDD0), and plant-available moisture, which is represented by the ratio of modelled actual to equilibrium evapotranspiration (α) and corrected for past CO2 changes. This is done for 71 individual pollen records from the eastern Mediterranean region covering part or all of the interval from 12.3 ka to the present. We use these reconstructions to create regional composites that illustrate the long-term trends in each variable. We compare these composites with transient climate model simulations to explore potential causes of the observed trends. We show that the glacial–Holocene transition and the early part of the Holocene was characterised by conditions colder than the present. Rapid increases in temperature occurred between ca. 10.3 and 9.3 ka, considerably after the end of the Younger Dryas. Although the time series are characterised by centennial to millennial oscillations, the MTCO showed a gradual increase from 9 ka to the present, consistent with the expectation that winter temperatures were forced by orbitally induced increases in insolation during the Holocene. The MTWA also showed an increasing trend from 9 ka and reached a maximum of ca. 1.5 ∘C greater than the present at ca. 4.5 and 5 ka, followed by a gradual decline towards present-day conditions. A delayed response to summer insolation changes is likely a reflection of the persistence of the Laurentide and Fennoscandian ice sheets; subsequent summer cooling is consistent with the expected response to insolation changes. Plant-available moisture increased rapidly after 11 ka, and conditions were wetter than today between 10 and 6 ka, but thereafter, α declined gradually. These trends likely reflect changes in atmospheric circulation and moisture advection into the region and were probably too small to influence summer temperature through land–surface feedbacks. Differences in the simulated trajectory of α in different models highlight the difficulties in reproducing circulation-driven moisture advection into the eastern Mediterranean.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Fossil Pollen Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Climate Model Simulationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pollen-based reconstructions of Holocene climate trends in the eastern Mediterranean region

Cruz-Silva,

Harrison,

Prentice

et al. 2023

Clim. Past

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…It has been suggested that meltwater was routed to the Black and Caspian Seas via the Dnieper and Volga Rivers during the early phase of deglaciation (e.g. Yanchilina et al, 2019;Aksu et al 2022;Vadsaria et al, 2022) and it would also be useful to investigate the impact of this on the regional climate. The availability of water is a crucial factor in the viability of early agriculture (Richerson et al, 2001;Zeder, 2011).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pollen-based reconstructions of Holocene climate trends in the eastern Mediterranean region

Cruz‐Silva

Harrison

Prentice

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Abstract. There has been considerable debate about the degree to which climate has driven societal changes in the eastern Mediterranean region, partly through reliance on a limited number of qualitative records of climate changes and partly reflecting the need to disentangle the joint impact of changes in different aspects of climate. Here, we use tolerance-weighted Weighted Averaging Partial Least Squares to derive reconstructions of mean temperature of the coldest month (MTCO), mean temperature of the warmest month (MTWA), growing degree days above a threshold of 0°C (GDD0) and plant-available moisture, represented by the ratio of modelled actual to equilibrium evapotranspiration (α) and corrected for past CO2 changes for 71 individual pollen records from the Eastern Mediterranean region covering part or all of the interval from 12.3 ka to the present. We use these reconstructions to create regional composites that illustrate the long-term trends in each variable. We compare these composites with transient climate model simulations to explore potential causes of the observed trends. We show that the glacial-Holocene transition and the early part of the Holocene was characterised by conditions colder and drier than present. Rapid increases in temperature and moisture occurred between ca 10.3 and 9.3 ka, considerably after the end of the Younger Dryas. Although the time series are characterised by centennial-to-millennial oscillations, MTCO showed a gradual increase from 9 ka to the present, consistent with the expectation that winter temperatures were forced by orbitally-induced increases in insolation during the Holocene. MTWA also showed an increasing trend from 9 ka and reached a maximum of ca 1.5°C greater than present at ca 5 ka, followed by a gradual decline towards present-day conditions. A delayed response to summer insolation changes is likely a reflection of the persistence of the Laurentide and Fennoscandian ice sheets; subsequent summer cooling is consistent with the expected response to insolation changes. Plant-available moisture increased rapidly between 11 and 9.3 ka and conditions were slightly wetter than today between 9–8 ka, but thereafter α declined gradually. These trends likely reflect changes in atmospheric circulation and moisture advection into the region, and were probably too small to influence summer temperature through land-surface feedbacks. Differences in the simulated trajectory of α in different models highlight the difficulties in reproducing circulation-driven moisture advection into the eastern Mediterranean.

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Sedimentology and stratigraphy of the Jordan River Dureijat archeological site reveal subtle late Pleistocene water-level changes at Lake Hula, Jordan Valley, Israel

Bunin,

Zhang,

Sharon

et al. 2023

J Paleolimnol

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Sedimentary records of environmental conditions retrieved from archeological sites provide valuable insight into the milieux of ancient humans and context to understand societal and cultural changes. At Jordan River Dureijat, an open-air site in Israel’s Hula Valley documenting the entire Epipaleolithic period as well as the Early Neolithic, sediments exposed on the walls of the excavation pit reveal a sequence of lacustrine deposits accumulated continuously between c. 21.1 and 11.3 cal ka BP near the southeast margin of Paleolake Hula. Through sediment-grain-size, geochemical, and paleontological analyses, we describe the nature of the Paleolake Hula from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to the start of the Holocene. Until c. 17.2 cal ka BP, Paleolake Hula existed as a relatively large and well-buffered waterbody. A rapid and substantial drawdown of the lake occurred at 17.2 cal ka BP, followed by more frequent changes in the position of the shoreline in a smaller and shallower lake, resulting in the deposition of alternating near-shore and deeper lacustrine facies. Since the LGM, seven beds of structureless, silty sediments preserve archeological artifacts belonging to three Epipaleolithic cultures as well as the Early Neolithic pre-pottery Neolithic A culture. These sediments were deposited during phases of low lake level during which times humans waded into the shallow part of the lake, leaving behind stone and bone tools such as bladelets, lunates and burins, fishing hooks, line weights and net sinkers. Using radiocarbon-dated charcoal and a Bayesian statistical model, we produced a chronostratigraphic model for the archeological site, which enables the comparison of proxy paleoclimate records produced from this site’s sediments with regional archives as well as with global trends and changes in the Northern Hemisphere climate. Periods of low lake stands are correlated with the end of the LGM, Heinrich Event 1, and the beginning of the Younger Dryas Stadial. High water stands occurred contemporaneously with the peak of the LGM and during the Bølling–Allerød interstadial. This new water-level record from Lake Hula confirms that lake-level changes here broadly paralleled those of the Dead Sea and Sea of Galilee during the late Pleistocene, highlighting the importance of northern water sources to the overall water balance of the lakes along the Dead Sea Transform.

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Freshwater influx to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea from the melting of the Fennoscandian ice sheet during the last deglaciation

Cited by 4 publications

References 63 publications

Pollen-based reconstructions of Holocene climate trends in the eastern Mediterranean region

Pollen-based reconstructions of Holocene climate trends in the eastern Mediterranean region

Pollen-based reconstructions of Holocene climate trends in the eastern Mediterranean region

Sedimentology and stratigraphy of the Jordan River Dureijat archeological site reveal subtle late Pleistocene water-level changes at Lake Hula, Jordan Valley, Israel

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