Search results for "Roman Warm Period"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
2500 Years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility
2011
Climate variations influenced the agricultural productivity, health risk, and conflict level of preindustrial societies. Discrimination between environmental and anthropogenic impacts on past civilizations, however, remains difficult because of the paucity of high-resolution paleoclimatic evidence. We present tree ring-based reconstructions of central European summer precipitation and temperature variability over the past 2500 years. Recent warming is unprecedented, but modern hydroclimatic variations may have at times been exceeded in magnitude and duration. Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity. Increased climate variability from similar to 250 to 6…
A review of climate reconstructions from terrestrial climate archives covering the first millennium AD in northwestern Europe
2018
AbstractLarge changes in landscape, vegetation, and culture in northwestern (NW) Europe during the first millennium AD seem concurrent with climatic shifts. Understanding of this relation requires high-resolution palaeoclimate reconstructions. Therefore, we compiled available climate reconstructions from sites across NW Europe (extent research area: 10°W–20°E, 45°–60°N) through review of literature and the underlying data, to identify supraregional climatic changes in this region. All reconstructions cover the period from AD 1 to 1000 and have a temporal resolution of ≤50 yr. This resulted in 22 climate reconstructions/proxy records based on different palaeoclimate archives: chironomids (1)…
Climate change and human impact in central Spain during Roman times: High-resolution multi-proxy analysis of a tufa lake record (Somolinos, 1280m asl)
2012
The Roman Period is considered a crucial phase in the evolution of Holocene landscapes, due to the coincidence of major climatic, environmental, economic and cultural changes. However, there is still debate as to the regional expression of these changes, and to the mechanisms involved, particularly in the topographically and climatically complex region of the Mediterranean. In order to improve our understanding of the synergies between societal and environmental change during this period in central Spain, we present a comprehensive case study based on the integration of multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental, archaeological and historical data. High-resolution, interdisciplinary research has been …
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…