High-frequency climate fluctuations over the last deglaciation in the Alboran Sea, Western Mediterranean: Evidence from calcareous plankton assemblages
Abstract A high resolution study, with a centennial scale resolution, has been performed on the calcareous plankton assemblage (coccolithophores and planktonic foraminifera) at Ocean Drilling Program Site 976, Alboran Sea (Western Mediterranean), focusing on the interval between 20 and 9 ka, in order to reconstruct changes in surface and subsurface water dynamics and productivity. The biotic surface water proxies integrate the extremely detailed (multi-decadal scale) geochemical data set and the pollen record already available at the core, thus providing a complete paleoenvironmental/paleoceanographic reconstruction. The results highlight the sensitivity of the calcareous plankton in record…
The Eurasian Modern Pollen Database (EMPD), version 2
The Eurasian (née European) Modern Pollen Database (EMPD) was established in 2013 to provide a public database of high-quality modern pollen surface samples to help support studies of past climate, land cover, and land use using fossil pollen. The EMPD is part of, and complementary to, the European Pollen Database (EPD) which contains data on fossil pollen found in Late Quaternary sedimentary archives throughout the Eurasian region. The EPD is in turn part of the rapidly growing Neotoma database, which is now the primary home for global palaeoecological data. This paper describes version 2 of the EMPD in which the number of samples held in the database has been increased by 60% from 4826 to…
Holocene climate variability of the Western Mediterranean: Surface water dynamics inferred from calcareous plankton assemblages
A high-resolution study (centennial scale) has been performed on the calcareous plankton assemblage of the Holocene portion of the Ocean Drilling Program Site 976 (Alboran Sea) with the aim to identify the main changes in the surface water dynamic. The dataset also provided a seasonal foraminiferal sea surface water temperatures (SSTs), estimated using the modern analog technique SIMMAX 28, and it was compared with available geochemical and pollen data at the site. Three main climate shifts were identified as (1) the increase in abundance of Syracosphaera spp. and Turborotalita quinqueloba marks the early Holocene humid phase, during maximum summer insolation and enhanced river runoff. It i…
Sedimentary and diagenetic markers of the restriction in a marine basin: the Lorca Basin (SE Spain) during the Messinian
Abstract The Lorca Basin (southeastern Spain) is part of a chain of small marginal Neogene basins located in the structurally active Betic area. The Upper Miocene (Messinian) sequence is composed of a thick diatomite-bearing series (Tripoli Unit) overlain by the Main Evaporites, analogous to the classical succession that records the main events during the Salinity Crisis in the Mediterranean region. The shallow restricted conditions of this region amplified the sedimentary responses to local and global forcings. An integrated approach using sedimentology, micropalaeontology, stable isotope geochemistry and organic geochemistry has been applied to the Tortonian/Messinian succession of the Lo…