A late Eemian aridity pulse in central Europe during the last glacial inception

2005

How do ice ages begin? It's an obvious question to ask as we enjoy the relative luxury of an interglacial, but a hard one to answer. A look at past transitions may give some clues as to how this period will one day come to an end. A climate reconstruction based on sediments found beneath a lake in the Eifel mountains in Germany provides evidence of an extreme climate event lasting 468 years right at the end of the last interglacial. Dust storms, aridity, bushfires and the loss of trees associated with a warm climate coincided with a southward shift of the warm waters of the North Atlantic drift. In terms of insolation — the rate of delivery of the Sun's radiation to Earth — conditions then …