Porites corals from Crete (Greece) open a window into Late Miocene (10Ma) seasonal and interannual climate variability

Variations in the biotic composition of marine shallow water carbonates document global climatic changes. However, a discontinuous stratigraphic record and uncertainties regarding the ages limit the significance of shallow water carbonates as palaeoclimatic archives on geological time-scales. Notwithstanding these deficits, the environmental information stored in the skeleton of reef biota is a unique source of information that resolves seasonal to interannual climate variability in geological time. Application of the method to corals from carbonate rocks is usually restricted to the past 130,000yr, because the aragonite skeleton undergoes rapid diagenetic alteration. Consequently, reconstr…