Major volcanic eruptions are known to cause considerable short-term impacts on the global climate. Their influence on long-term climate variability and regime shifts is less well understood. Here we show that very large, bipolar eruptions occurred more frequently than expected by chance just before abrupt climate change events in the last glacial period (the Dansgaard-Oeschger events). Thus, such large eruptions may in some cases act as short-term triggers to abrupt regime shifts of the climate.

Greenland ice core records show that the climate of the last glacial period was frequently interrupted by rapid warming events, followed by cooling episodes of vastly different duration. We fit a generic waveform to the noisy ice core record in order to extract a robust climate signal and empirically study what controls the amplitude and duration of the warmings and coolings. We find that cooling transitions are more predictable than warmings and are influenced by different climate forcings.