Abstract
The Late Holocene was characterized by several centennial-scale climate oscillations including the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages Cold Period, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. The detection and investigation of such climate anomalies requires paleoclimate archives with an accurate chronology as well as a high temporal resolution. Here, we present 230Th/U-dated high-resolution multi-proxy records (δ13C, δ18O and trace elements) for the last 2500 years of four speleothems from Bunker Cave and the Herbstlabyrinth cave system in Germany. The multi-proxy data of all four speleothems show evidence of two warm and two cold phases during the last 2500 years, which coincide with the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period, as well as the Dark Ages Cold Period and the Little Ice Age, respectively. During these four cold and warm periods, the δ18O and δ13C records of all four speleothems and the Mg concentration of the speleothems Bu4 (Bunker Cave) and TV1 (Herbstlabyrinth cave system) show common features and are thus interpreted to be related to past climate variability. Comparison with other paleoclimate records suggests a strong influence of the North Atlantic Oscillation at the two caves sites, which is reflected by warm and humid conditions during the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period, and cold and dry climate during the Dark Ages Cold period and the Little Ice Age. The Mg records of speleothems Bu1 (Bunker Cave) and NG01 (Herbstlabyrinth) as well as the inconsistent patterns of Sr, Ba and P suggests that the processes controlling the abundance of these trace elements are dominated by site-specific effects rather than being related to supra-regional climate variability.
Highlights
Even if short-lived phases and events of extreme climate conditions occur rarely, they often have serious consequences for the ecosystem and the civilization of the affected region
The Late Holocene was characterized by several centennial-scale climate oscillations including the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages Cold Period, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age
We present high-resolution δ18O and δ13C as well as trace element records for the last 2500 years based on four stalagmites (Bu1, Bu4, NG01 and TV1) from Bunker Cave and Herbstlabyrinth cave system in Germany
Summary
Even if short-lived phases and events of extreme climate conditions occur rarely, they often have serious consequences for the ecosystem and the civilization of the affected region. During the last 2500 years, several centennial-scale climate anomalies have occurred These include the Roman Warm Period (RWP, 2.3–1.6 ka BP, [2,3,4,5]), the Dark Ages Cold Period (DACP, 1.6–1.25 ka BP, [6,7]) with the temporally overlapping Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA, 1.48–1.36 ka BP, [8]), the Medieval Warm Period (MWP, 1.1–0.6 ka BP, known as Medieval Climate Anomaly, [9,10,11]) and the Little Ice Age (LIA, 0.6–0.2 ka BP, [12,13]). During phases of Roman and medieval prosperity, humid and warm summers prevailed, whereas the demise of the western Roman Empire as well as the turmoil of the Migration Period (MP, 1.75–1.6 ka BP, [19,20]) coincided with increased climate variability between 1.75 and 1.4 ka BP [3,13]
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