Search results for "Little Ice Age"

Economic Adaptation to Risky Environment in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of the "Accrues" of the Doubs in Chaussin (Jura, France) from c. 1370 to c…

2017

Located along the meanders of the Doubs, the people of Chaussin had to deal with the particular impact of the river on their environment. Due to the impact of the Little Ice Age on water levels in the area, the Doubs sometimes had special floods, which frequently changed its course from the end of the fourteenth century. As a result, some lands were absorbed, and others emerged, which were called the “accrues.” From 1377 the first observation of lost lands appears in the accounts of the castellan, in a petition from landowners who did not want to pay taxes on these fields. More than twenty years later, in the first decade of the fifteenth century, the duke of Burgundy, facing the same situa…

Calcareous nannofossil assemblages from the Central Mediterranean Sea over the last four centuries: the impact of the Little Ice Age

2010

Abstract. We present decadal-scale calcareous nannofossil data from four short cores (Station 272, 37° 17' N, 12° 48' E, 226 m depth; St 342, 36° 42' N, 13° 55' E, 858.2 m depth; St 407, 36° 23' N, 14° 27' E, 345.4 m depth; C90-1M, 40° 36' N, 14° 42' E, 103.4 m depth) recovered in the central Mediterranean Sea (northern Sicily Channel and Tyrrhenian Sea), which, on the basis of 210Pb activity span the last 200–350 years. Assemblages are dominated by placoliths, mostly Emiliania huxleyi, while, at least in the Sicily Channel sediments, Florisphaera profunda was an important part of the coccolithophore community. The paleoenvironmental reconstruction, based on ecological preference of species…

2017

From 2000 to 2015, tsunamis and storms killed more than 430,000 people worldwide and affected a further >530 million, with total damages exceeding US$970 billion. These alarming trends, underscored by the tragic events of the 2004 Indian Ocean catastrophe, have fueled increased worldwide demands for assessments of past, present, and future coastal risks. Nonetheless, despite its importance for hazard mitigation, discriminating between storm and tsunami deposits in the geological record is one of the most challenging and hotly contended topics in coastal geoscience. To probe this knowledge gap, we present a 4500-year reconstruction of “tsunami” variability from the Mediterranean based on str…

Revising midlatitude summer temperatures back to A.D. 600 based on a wood density network

2015

Annually resolved and millennium-long reconstructions of large-scale temperature variability are primarily composed of tree ring width (TRW) chronologies. Changes in ring width, however, have recently been shown to bias the ratio between low- and high-frequency signals. To overcome limitations in capturing the full spectrum of past temperature variability, we present a network of 15 maximum latewood density (MXD) chronologies distributed across the Northern Hemisphere extratropics. Independent subsets of continental-scale records consistently reveal high MXD before 1580 and after 1910, with below average values between these periods. Reconstructed extratropical summer temperatures reflect n…

Quantification de l’ablation d’un bassin versant marno-calcaire alpin durant le Petit Age Glaciaire par l’étude d’un système lacustre (cas du lac du «…

2002

Measurements of present-day erosion may give heterogeneous results according to the methods used. This article proposes an approach to erosion during the Little Ice Age by the quantitative analysis of detritical materials trapped in a dammed lake. This infill is recognized through two drillings, and these specific observations are supplemented by a seismic reflexion survey which provided a reliable estimate of the geometry of the lake infill. The sedimentary production is calculated from three pieces of data: (1) the surface of the drainage area, (2) duration of the lake system activity and (3) the volume of trapped sediments. From the three determined variables, we propose a detritical product…

1200-yr high-resolution terrestrial climate archive from the middle of the Mediterranean: The sedimentary record from Lake “Specchio di Venere” on Pa…

2011

The special location of Lake "Specchio di Venere" on Pantelleria Island in the Sicily Channel (Mediterranean Sea) between Tunisia and Sicily offers a unique terrestrial archive recording atmospheric changes, which are otherwise difficult to decipher in the marine records from this area. The lake is an endorheic saline basin with a maximum depth of 12.5 m. As the water input depends on rainfall, precipitation variations influence changes of the lake's water chemistry. In summer 2008, Lake Venere was cored with a modified Livingstone corer revealing a composite sedimentary sequence of 10.29 m length. Two radiocarbon dates form a preliminary age model indicating a very high sedimentation rate …

Conflictividad social en torno a los azudes del Júcar a finales del siglo XVI. Un problema recurrente por la gestión del agua

2015

[EN] The uses of water resources of the river Júcar have been a recurring element of conflict throughout the history that, at some times, deepened. This is what happened between the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries, coinciding with climatic variations derived from the Little Ice Age. The building of dams, specks and other structures to slow the free flow of the river produced a clash of interests in different aspects such as economic, political or jurisdictional between the different towns of the area of the Ribera del Júcar (Carcaixent versus Alzira, Alzira versus Sueca…) channelled largely through the courts of the kingdom. This paper seeks to analyse these disputes …

Solar influence on winter severity in central Europe

2012

[1] The last two winters in central Europe were unusually cold in comparison to the years before. Meteorological data, mainly from the last 50 years, and modelling studies have suggested that both solar activity and El Nino strength may influence such central European winter coldness. To investigate the mechanisms behind this in a statistically robust way and to test which of the two factors was more important during the last 230 years back into the Little Ice Age, we use historical reports of freezing of the river Rhine. The historical data show that 10 of the 14 freeze years occurred close to sunspot minima and only one during a year of moderate El Nino. This solar influence is underpinne…

A 5500-year oxygen isotope record of high arctic environmental change from southern Spitsbergen

2017

The oxygen isotope composition of chironomid head capsules in a sediment core spanning the past 5500 years from Lake Svartvatnet in southern Spitsbergen was used to reconstruct the oxygen isotope composition of lake water (δ18Olw) and local precipitation. The δ18Olw values display shifts from the baseline variability consistent with the timing of recognized historical climatic episodes, such as the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages Cold Period and the ‘Little Ice Age’. The highest values of the record, ca. 3‰ above modern δ18Olw values, occur at ca. 1900–1800 cal. yr BP. Three negative excursions increasing in intensity toward the present, at 3400–3200, 1250–1100, and 350–50 cal. yr BP, are…

Benthic foraminifera as indicators of relative sea-level fluctuations: Paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic reconstruction of a Holocene marine succe…

2017

This study presents the results of an integrated stratigraphic analysis conducted on a marine gravity core (MSK-12 C4) recovered from the outer continental shelf (82 mwater depth) of western Calabria, ~2.6 km, NE of Capo Vaticano (Eastern Tyrrhenian margin). The gravity core MSK-12 C4 recovered a stratigraphic succession of 4.18 m beneath the seafloor representing the last ~11.1 ka. Sedimentological analysis, micropaleontological quantitative analysis on benthic foraminiferal assemblages, tephrostratigraphy, sequence stratigraphic analysis of high resolution reflection seismic data recorded in the core site area and AMS 14C absolute age determinations allowed reconstructing the marine recor…