Late Quaternary climate variability from western Mediterranean lake archives by multi-proxy data

Climate change is under global debate, due to increasing occurrence of extreme weather events affecting the present-day life. Predicting future climate is challenging, because of the complex interactions in the climate system. Only full understanding of past climate processes and forcing mechanisms allows us to understand and evaluate on-going changes. Some regions are more vulnerable than others. The Western Mediterranean, due to the transitional location between complex atmospheric and marine circulation systems, is highly sensitive to climatic changes. This work is affiliated to a Collaborative Research Centre (CRC 806 “Our Way to Europe”) dealing with history of human mankind and is in particular a contribution to the sub-project investigating the disappearance of Neanderthals in the Iberian Peninsula, which is supposed to be connected to high frequent climate variability. Three different sites, aligned on a SW-NE-axis from Southern Spain to Northern Italy, have been under investigation for Late Quaternary palaeoenvironmental reconstruction. Aiming on terrestrial records, which are scarce for the Western Mediterranean, sediment cores from three lakes revealed palaeoinformation: i) Laguna de Fuente de Piedra (LFP; SW-Spain), ii) Lake Banyoles (NE-Spain), and iii) Lake Como (N-Italy). LFP a shallow endorheic saline lake, whereas Lake Banyoles is a tectono-karstic open fresh-water lake, and Lake Como is a large 450 m-deep, semi-closed lake, all three are obviously of particularly difference in their characteristics. Multi-proxy data acquisition has been carried out and palaeoclimatic records at different temporal resolution with different temporal range have been achieved. Due to the different control mechanisms on sedimentation processes, the selection of climate-sensitive proxies for each site was challenging. For the hydro-sensitive LFP, optical description of sediment cores (max. 14 m long), elemental data (Ti, Ca, S, Sr, ratios, and time series analyses), mineralogical data including crystal habits and ...