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RESEARCH PRODUCT

14. Abrupt cooling events at the very end of the last interglacial

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Abstract A comparison of a last interglacial annually laminated and varve counted maar lake record from the Eifel/Germany, with a laminated lake sediment record from Northern Germany, shows that high-resolution cores can be correlated across central Europe by dust/loess content, if the resolution of grain-size data is on the order of decades/centuries. Phases of widespread dust dispersal are the same as the cold events in the Greenland ice and North Atlantic sea-surface temperature patterns. The first occurrence of dust in Northern Germany and in the Eifel is during the late Eemian aridity pulse (LEAP, Sirocko et al., 2005) which is called C26 in ocean records (McManus, this volume). This cold and arid event occurred exactly at the time of the last glacial inception at 118 kyr. Vegetation change in Northern Germany and the Eifel is out of phase after the LEAP. A taiga/ tundra vegetation characterizes Northern Germany between the LEAP and C24, whereas at the same time a Carpinus -dominated temperate forest spread in the Eifel region, comparable to the Carpinus -dominated forests in France (Sanchez Goni et al., 2005). A drastic cooling, associated with widespread aridity, came with the C24 cold event, when the vegetation of central Europe changed to a tundra or shrub tundra.