Solar forcing for nutricline depth variability inferred by coccoliths in the pre-industrial northwestern Mediterranean

The oceanic system has been rapidly changing under human-induced climate change that is taking place at unprecedented rates. The paleoclimate archive of the last two millennia is often adopted to discern the ongoing anthropogenic global warming from the pre-industrial natural climate variability. The Mediterranean Sea is an especially critical system, being particularly affected by climate change. A common group of marine unicellular planktonic calcifiers, coccolithophores, are forming calcite plates, coccoliths. When reaching the sediments, they have been employed as a proxy in many paleoenvironmental reconstructions and are increasingly used in the last centuries. Recent studies indicate …

Preliminary Results on Recent Calcareous nannofossil Assemblages from the Central Mediterranean

PALEOENVIRONMENTAL RECONSTRUCTION ON LATE CALABRIAN STAGE SEDIMENTS FROM THE BELICE VALLEY (SOUTHWESTERN SICILY - ITALY) BASED ON OSTRACODA

The Middle Pleistocene Transition is the most recent re-organization of the climate system, happened between 1.2 and 0.7 Ma. Marine sediments outcropping in Sicily have been a relevant source of information on the paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental evolution of the Mediterranean Sea, over this time window. Among others, previous studies in Sicily identified and described the very cold phase and the marked sea level fall associated with the top MIS 22, which is lithologically expressed by a calcarenite bed colonized by the Arctica islandica northern guest. Here we investigate ostracod assemblages from marine sediments in the southwestern Sicily. Sediments, ascribed to the late Calabrian St…