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 …