Speleothem evidence for late Holocene climate variability and floods in Southern Greece

Abstract

We present stable isotope data (δ18O, δ13C) from a detrital rich stalagmite from Kapsia Cave, the Peloponnese, Greece. The cave is rich in archeological remains and there are reasons to believe that flooding of the cave has directly affected humans using the cave. Using a combination of U–Th and 14C dating to constrain a site-specific correction factor for (232Th/238U) detrital molar ratio, a linear age model was constructed. The age model shows that the stalagmite grew during the period from ca. 950 BC to ca. AD 830. The stable oxygen record from Kapsia indicates cyclical changes of close to 500 yr in precipitation amount, with rapid shifts towards wetter conditions followed by slowly developing aridity. Superimposed on this signal, wetter conditions are inferred around 850, 700, 500 and 400–100 BC, and around AD 160–300 and AD 770; and driest conditions are inferred to have occurred around 450 BC, AD 100–150 and AD 650. Detrital horizons in the stalagmite indicate that three major floods took place in the cave at 500 BC, 70 BC and AD 450. The stable carbon isotope record reflects changes in biological activity being a result of both climate and human activities.

A 2800-year multi-proxy sedimentary record of climate change from Lake Çubuk (Göynük, Bolu, NW Anatolia)

“…The existing age model shows that they are mostly multi-decadal and separate smaller scale climate cycles. Similar abrupt multi-decadal changes were distinguished in some late Holocene climate records and were related to the North Atlantic Oscillation (Cronin et al, 2003;Finné et al, 2014).…”

The environmental history of Classical and Hellenistic Greece: The contribution of environmental archaeology

“…For instance, there has been a debate since the 1980s over whether the sporadic episodes of sustained erosion detected in the Argolid since the sixth millennium BCE, including one dating to the Hellenistic period (300–50 BCE), should be attributed primarily to climate change, human action, or both (Pope & Van Andel, ) . Although there is good reason to think that the abandonment and deterioration of landscape features such as terraces in the course of the Hellenistic period contributed to this process (Van Andel, Runnels, & Pope, ), the results from nearby Kapsia cave show clear evidence of a distinct increase in precipitation right around 300 BCE, with increased humidity levels continuing until around the mid‐first century BCE, at which point we see a transition to sustained drier conditions again (Finné et al, , figures 7 and 9). Thus, we can now state unequivocally that both climate change and shifts in the exploitation of the landscape contributed to this phenomenon.…”

“…Given the widespread distribution of caves in the karstic landscapes of Greece, speleothem studies promise to yield much highly useful information on past climates in the near future, but such efforts are only just beginning. A notable example is Finné's work on speleothems from the caves at Kapsia in eastern Arkadia and Alepotrypa on Cape Tainaron, which has gone a considerable way towards reconstructing a high‐resolution record of precipitation and temperature spanning the first millennium BCE in the Peloponnese (Finné et al, ; Weiberg et al, ). This work has provided a clear insight into centennial‐ and decadal‐scale shifts in precipitation, allowing us one of the first opportunities to study the relationship between fluctuations in rainfall and historical events in ancient Greece directly.…”

Modelling the freshwater supply of cisterns in ancient Greece

“…Palaeoclimate data from the eastern Mediterranean suggest the period between 400 and 50 BC is one with substantial regional differences, in common with other periods. Palaeoclimate data from the Peloponnese, southwest Turkey and the Albanian coast suggest this area was generally wetter in the interval 400 to 50 BC compared to the centuries just before and after (Eastwood et al 2007;Roberts et al 2008;Zanchetta et al 2012;Leng et al 2013: Finné et al 2014Boyd 2015). However, areas farther in the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia and the Levant, seem to have been generally drier in this interval (e.g.…”