Abstract
Abstract. The “4.2 ka event” is frequently described as a major global climate anomaly between 4.2 and 3.9 ka, which defines the beginning of the current Meghalayan age in the Holocene epoch. The “event” has been disproportionately reported from proxy records from the Northern Hemisphere, but its climatic manifestation remains much less clear in the Southern Hemisphere. Here, we present highly resolved and chronologically well-constrained speleothem oxygen and carbon isotopes records between ∼6 and 3 ka from Rodrigues Island in the southwestern subtropical Indian Ocean, located ∼600 km east of Mauritius. Our records show that the 4.2 ka event did not manifest itself as a period of major climate change at Rodrigues Island in the context of our record's length. Instead, we find evidence for a multi-centennial drought that occurred near-continuously between 3.9 and 3.5 ka and temporally coincided with climate change throughout the Southern Hemisphere.
Highlights
IntroductionThe “4.2 ka event” is considered to be a widespread climate event between 4.2 and 3.9 ka (thousand years before present, where the present is 1950 CE) (e.g. Weiss et al, 1993, 2016)
The “4.2 ka event” is considered to be a widespread climate event between 4.2 and 3.9 ka (e.g. Weiss et al, 1993, 2016)
The time interval from 6 to 3 ka in LAVI-4 speleothem corresponds to a sample depth of 274 to 81 mm below the top, respectively
Summary
The “4.2 ka event” is considered to be a widespread climate event between 4.2 and 3.9 ka (thousand years before present, where the present is 1950 CE) (e.g. Weiss et al, 1993, 2016). Many paleoclimate records from the Northern Hemisphere (NH) have characterised the event as a multi-decadal to multi-centennial period of arid and cooler conditions across the Mediterranean, Middle East, South Asia and North Africa The structure of the 4.2 ka event from many proxy records, such as peat cellulose records from the eastern Tibetan Plateau (Hong et al, 2003, 2018), speleothem from northeastern India (Berkelhammer et al, 2012) and southern Italy (Drysdale et al, 2006), marine sediments from the Gulf of Oman (Cullen et al, 2000) and the northern Red Sea (Arz et al, 2006), and the dust record in the Kilimanjaro ice core (Thompson et al, 2002), typically characterised it as a single pulse-like signal in the long-term context of these records. Other records show virtually unchanged hydrological conditions (e.g. Tierney et al, 2008, 2011; Konecky et al, 2011) or two-pulsed multi-decadal length wet events (Railsback et al, 2018) during the period contemporaneous with the 4.2 ka event
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