During the last glacial cycle, Greenland temperature showed many rapid temperature variations, the so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events. The past atmospheric methane concentration closely followed these temperature variations, which implies that the warmings recorded in Greenland were probably hemispheric in extent. Here we substantially extend and complete the North Greenland Ice Core Project (NGRIP) methane record from the Preboreal Holocene (PB) back to the end of the last interglacial period with a mean time resolution of 54 yr. We relate the amplitudes of the methane increases associated with DO events to the amplitudes of the local Greenland NGRIP temperature increases derived from stable nitrogen isotope (delta N-15) measurements, which have been performed along the same ice core (Kindler et al., 2014). We find the ratio to oscillate between 5 parts per billion (ppb) per degrees C and 18 ppb degrees C-1 with the approximate frequency of the precessional cycle. A remarkably high ratio of 25.5 ppb degrees C-1 is reached during the transition from the Younger Dryas (YD) to the PB. Analysis of the timing of the fast methane and temperature increases reveals significant lags of the methane increases relative to NGRIP temperature for DO events 5, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 19, and 20. These events generally have small methane increase rates and we hypothesize that the lag is caused by pronounced northward displacement of the source regions from stadial to interstadial. We further show that the relative interpolar concentration difference (rIPD) of methane is about 4.5% for the stadials between DO events 18 and 20, which is in the same order as in the stadials before and after DO event 2 around the Last Glacial Maximum. The rIPD of methane remains relatively stable throughout the full last glacial, with a tendency for elevated values during interstadial compared to stadial periods.

Combining proxy information and climate model simulations reconciles these sources of information about past climates. This, in turn, strengthens our understanding of past climatic changes. The analogue or proxy surrogate reconstruction method is a computationally cheap data assimilation approach, which searches in a pool of simulated climate states the best fit to proxy data. We use the approach to reconstruct European summer mean temperature from the 13th century until present using the Euro 2k set of proxy records and a pool of global climate simulation output fields. Our focus is on quantifying the uncertainty of the reconstruction, because previous applications of the analogue method rarely provided uncertainty ranges. We show several ways of estimating reconstruction uncertainty for the analogue method, which take into account the non-climate part of the variability in each proxy record.

In general, our reconstruction agrees well at multi-decadal timescales with the Euro 2k reconstruction, which was conducted with two different statistical methods and no information from model simulations. In both methodological approaches, the decades around the year 1600 CE were the coldest. However, the approaches disagree on the warmest pre-industrial periods. The reconstructions from the analogue method also represent the local variations of the observed proxies. The diverse uncertainty estimates obtained from our analogue approaches can be locally larger or smaller than the estimates from the Euro 2k effort. Local uncertainties of the temperature reconstructions tend to be large in areas that are poorly covered by the proxy records. Uncertainties highlight the ambiguity of field-based reconstructions constrained by a limited set of proxies.

Because the total air content (TAC) of polar ice is directly affected by the atmospheric pressure and temperature, its record in polar ice cores was initially considered as a proxy for past ice sheet elevation changes. However, the Antarctic ice core TAC record is known to also contain an insolation signature, although the underlying physical mechanisms are still a matter of debate. Here we present a high-resolution TAC record over the whole North Greenland Ice Core Project ice core, covering the last 120 000 years, which independently supports an insolation signature in Greenland. Wavelet analysis reveals a clear precession and obliquity signal similar to previous findings on Antarctic TAC, with a different insolation history. In our high-resolution record we also find a decrease of 4-6% (4-5mL kg(-1)) in TAC as a response to Dansgaard-Oeschger events (DO events). TAC starts to decrease in parallel to increasing Greenland surface temperature and slightly before CH4 reacts to the warming but also shows a two-step decline that lasts for several centuries into the warm interstadial. The TAC response is larger than expected considering only changes in air density by local temperature and atmospheric pressure as a driver, pointing to a transient firnification response caused by the accumulation-induced increase in the load on the firn at bubble close-off, while temperature changes deeper in the firn are still small.

The Bering Strait connects the Arctic and Pacific oceans and separates the North American and Asian landmasses. The presently shallow (similar to 53 m) strait was exposed during the sea level lowstand of the last glacial period, which permitted human migration across a land bridge today referred to as the Bering Land Bridge. Proxy studies (stable isotope composition of foraminifera, whale migration into the Arctic Ocean, mollusc and insect fossils and paleobotanical data) have suggested a range of ages for the Bering Strait reopening, mainly falling within the Younger Dryas stadial (12.9-11.7 cal ka BP). Here we provide new information on the deglacial and post-glacial evolution of the Arctic-Pacific connection through the Bering Strait based on analyses of geological and geophysical data from Herald Canyon, located north of the Bering Strait on the Chukchi Sea shelf region in the western Arctic Ocean. Our results suggest an initial opening at about 11 cal ka BP in the earliest Holocene, which is later than in several previous studies. Our key evidence is based on a well-dated core from Herald Canyon, in which a shift from a near-shore environment to a Pacific-influenced open marine setting at around 11 cal ka BP is observed. The shift corresponds to meltwater pulse 1b (MWP1b) and is interpreted to signify relatively rapid breaching of the Bering Strait and the submergence of the large Bering Land Bridge. Although the precise rates of sea level rise cannot be quantified, our new results suggest that the late deglacial sea level rise was rapid and occurred after the end of the Younger Dryas stadial.

In order to reconstruct the temperature of the North Greenland Ice Core Project (NGRIP) site, new measurements of delta N-15 have been performed covering the time period from the beginning of the Holocene to Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) event 8. Together with previously measured and mostly published delta N-15 data, we present for the first time a NGRIP temperature reconstruction for the whole last glacial period from 10 to 120 kyr b2k (thousand years before 2000 AD) including every DO event based on delta N-15 isotope measurements combined with a firn densification and heat diffusion model. The detected temperature rises at the onset of DO events range from 5 degrees C (DO 25) up to 16.5 degrees C (DO 11) with an uncertainty of +/- 3 degrees C. To bring measured and modelled data into agreement, we had to reduce the accumulation rate given by the NGRIP ss09sea06bm timescale in some periods by 30 to 35 %, especially during the last glacial maximum. A comparison between reconstructed temperature and delta O-18(ice) data confirms that the isotopic composition of the stadial was strongly influenced by seasonality. We evidence an anticorrelation between the variations of the delta O-18(ice) sensitivity to temperature (referred to as alpha) and obliquity in agreement with a simple Rayleigh distillation model. Finally, we suggest that alpha might be influenced by the Northern Hemisphere ice sheet volume.

Here we analyse the maximum latewood density (MXD) chronologies of two published tree-ring data sets: one from Tornetrask region in northernmost Sweden (TORN; Melvin et al., 2013) and one from northern Fennoscandia (FENN; Esper et al., 2012). We paid particular attention to the MXD low-frequency variations to reconstruct summer (June-August, JJA) long-term temperature history. We used published methods of tree-ring standardization: regional curve standardization (RCS) combined with signal-free implementation. Comparisons with RCS chronologies produced using single and multiple (non-climatic) ageing curves (to be removed from the initial MXD series) were also carried out. We develop a novel method of standardization, the correction implementation of signal-free standardization, tailored for detection of pure low-frequency signal in tree-ring chronologies. In this method, the error in RCS chronology with signal-free implementation is analytically assessed and extracted to produce an advanced chronology. The importance of correction becomes obvious at lower frequencies as smoothed chronologies become progressively more correlative with correction implementation. Subsampling the FENN data to mimic the lower chronology sample size of TORN data shows that the chronologies bifurcate during the 7th, 9th, 17th and 20th centuries. We used the two MXD data sets to reconstruct summer temperature variations over the period 8 BC through AD 2010. Our new reconstruction shows multi-decadal to multi-centennial variability with changes in the amplitude of the summer temperature of 2.2 degrees C on average during the Common Era. Although the MXD data provide palaeoclimate research with a highly reliable summer temperature proxy, the bifurcating dendroclimatic signals identified in the two data sets imply that future research should aim at a more advanced understanding of MXD data on distinct issues: (1) influence of past population density variations on MXD production, (2) potential biases when calibrating differently produced MXD data to produce one proxy record, (3) influence of the biological age of MXD data when introducing young trees into the chronology over the most recent past and (4) possible role of water-logging in MXD production when analysing tree-ring data of riparian trees.

The caldera-forming eruption of the Aniakchak volcano in the Aleutian Range on the Alaskan Peninsula at 3.6 cal kyr BP was one of the largest Holocene eruptions worldwide. The resulting ash is found as a visible sediment layer in several Alaskan sites and as a cryptotephra on Newfoundland and Greenland. This large geographic distribution, combined with the fact that the eruption is relatively well constrained in time using radiocarbon dating of lake sediments and annual layer counts in ice cores, makes it an excellent stratigraphic marker for dating and correlating mid-late Holocene sediment and paleoclimate records. This study presents the outcome of a targeted search for the Aniakchak tephra in a marine sediment core from the Arctic Ocean, namely Core SWERUS-L2-2-PC1 (2PC), raised from 57m water depth in Herald Canyon, western Chukchi Sea. High concentrations of tephra shards, with a geochemical signature matching that of Aniakchak ash, were observed across a more than 1.5m long sediment sequence. Since the primary input of volcanic ash is through atmospheric transport, and assuming that bioturbation can account for mixing up to ca. 10 cm of the marine sediment deposited at the coring site, the broad signal is interpreted as sustained reworking at the sediment source input. The isochron is therefore placed at the base of the sudden increase in tephra concentrations rather than at the maximum concentration. This interpretation of major reworking is strengthened by analysis of grain size distribution which points to ice rafting as an important secondary transport mechanism of volcanic ash. Combined with radiocarbon dates on mollusks in the same sediment core, the volcanic marker is used to calculate a marine radiocarbon reservoir age offset Delta R = 477 +/- 60 years. This relatively high value may be explained by the major influence of typically “carbon-old” Pacific waters, and it agrees well with recent estimates of Delta R along the northwest Alaskan coast, possibly indicating stable oceanographic conditions during the second half of the Holocene. Our use of a volcanic absolute age marker to obtain the marine reservoir age offset is the first of its kind in the Arctic Ocean and provides an important framework for improving chronologies and correlating marine sediment archives in this region. Core 2PC has a high sediment accumulation rate averaging 200 cm kyr(-1) throughout the last 4000 years, and the chronology presented here provides a solid base for high-resolution reconstructions of late Holocene climate and ocean variability in the Chukchi Sea.

The Toba eruption that occurred some 74 ka ago in Sumatra, Indonesia, is among the largest volcanic events on Earth over the last 2 million years. Tephra from this eruption has been spread over vast areas in Asia, where it constitutes a major time marker close to the Marine Isotope Stage 4/5 boundary. As yet, no tephra associated with Toba has been identified in Greenland or Antarctic ice cores. Based on new accurate dating of Toba tephra and on accurately dated European stalagmites, the Toba event is known to occur between the onsets of Greenland interstadials (GI) 19 and 20. Furthermore, the existing linking of Greenland and Antarctic ice cores by gas records and by the bipolar seesaw hypothesis suggests that the Antarctic counterpart is situated between Antarctic Isotope Maxima (AIM) 19 and 20. In this work we suggest a direct synchronization of Greenland (NGRIP) and Antarctic (EDML) ice cores at the Toba eruption based on matching of a pattern of bipolar volcanic spikes. Annual layer counting between volcanic spikes in both cores allows for a unique match. We first demonstrate this bipolar matching technique at the already synchronized Laschamp geomagnetic excursion (41 ka BP) before we apply it to the suggested Toba interval. The Toba synchronization pattern covers some 2000 yr in GI-20 and AIM19/20 and includes nine acidity peaks that are recognized in both ice cores. The suggested bipolar Toba synchronization has decadal precision. It thus allows a determination of the exact phasing of inter-hemispheric climate in a time interval of poorly constrained ice core records, and it allows for a discussion of the climatic impact of the Toba eruption in a global perspective. The bipolar linking gives no support for a long-term global cooling caused by the Toba eruption as Antarctica experiences a major warming shortly after the event. Furthermore, our bipolar match provides a way to place palaeo-environmental records other than ice cores into a precise climatic context.

High-resolution measurements of chemical impurities and methane concentrations in Greenland ice core samples from the early glacial period allow the extension of annual-layer counted chronologies and the improvement of gas age-ice age difference (Delta age) essential to the synchronization of ice core records. We report high-resolution measurements of a 50m section of the NorthGRIP ice core and corresponding annual layer thicknesses in order to constrain the duration of the Greenland Stadial 22 (GS-22) between Greenland Interstadials (GIs) 21 and 22, for which inconsistent durations and ages have been reported from Greenland and Antarctic ice core records as well as European speleothems. Depending on the chronology used, GS-22 occurred between approximately 89 (end of GI-22) and 83 kyr b2k (onset of GI-21). From annual layer counting, we find that GS-22 lasted between 2696 and 3092 years and was followed by a GI-21 pre-cursor event lasting between 331 and 369 yr. Our layer-based counting agrees with the duration of stadial 22 as determined from the NALPS speleothem record (3250 +/- 526 yr) but not with that of the GICC05modelext chronology (2620 yr) or an alternative chronology based on gas-marker synchronization to EPICA Dronning Maud Land ice core. These results show that GICC05modelext overestimates accumulation and/or underestimates thinning in this early part of the last glacial period. We also revise the possible ranges of NorthGRIP Delta depth (5.49 to 5.85 m) and Delta age (498 to 601 yr) at the warming onset of GI-21 as well as the Delta age range at the onset of the GI-21 precursor warming (523 to 654 yr), observing that temperature (represented by the delta N-15 proxy) increases before CH4 concentration by no more than a few decades.

A novel method for automated annual layer counting in seasonally-resolved paleoclimate records has been developed. It relies on algorithms from the statistical framework of hidden Markov models (HMMs), which originally was developed for use in machine speech recognition. The strength of the layer detection algorithm lies in the way it is able to imitate the manual procedures for annual layer counting, while being based on statistical criteria for annual layer identification. The most likely positions of multiple layer boundaries in a section of ice core data are determined simultaneously, and a probabilistic uncertainty estimate of the resulting layer count is provided, ensuring an objective treatment of ambiguous layers in the data. Furthermore, multiple data series can be incorporated and used simultaneously. In this study, the automated layer counting algorithm has been applied to two ice core records from Greenland: one displaying a distinct annual signal and one which is more challenging. The algorithm shows high skill in reproducing the results from manual layer counts, and the resulting timescale compares well to absolute-dated volcanic marker horizons where these exist.