Geological records show rapid climate change throughout the recent deglaciation. The drivers of these changes are still misunderstood but are often attributed to shifts in the Atlantic Ocean circulation from meltwater input. A cumulative effort to understand these processes prompted numerous simulations of this period. We use these to explain the chain of events and our collective ability to simulate them. The results demonstrate the importance of the meltwater amount used in the simulation.

We present a continuous record of lake sediments spanning the Holocene from central west Patagonia. By examining various indicators like elemental composition and grain size data, we found that, around ~5500 years ago, the way sediments settled in the lake changed. On a regional scale, our results suggest that rainfall, influenced by changes in the Southern Hemisphere Westerly Winds, played a key role in shaping the environment of the region for the past ~10 000 years.

Bacterial lipids (branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers; brGDGTs) extracted from lake sediments were used to reconstruct warm-season temperatures in central Europe during the past 60 kyr. Modern samples were used to test and correct for bias related to varying sources of brGDGTs. The temperature reconstruction is significantly correlated with other temperature reconstructions but features less millennial-scale variability, which is attributed to the seasonal signal of the proxy.

The ability of climate models to faithfully reproduce past warming episodes is a valuable test considering potentially large future warming. We develop a new method to compare simulations of the last deglaciation with temperature reconstructions. We find that reconstructions differ more between regions than simulations, potentially due to deficiencies in the simulation design, models, or reconstructions. Our work is a promising step towards benchmarking simulations of past climate transitions.

Records of the interaction between land and glacial ice movement in the Puget Lowland of Washington State are used to interpret that solid Earth movement provided stability to this marine-terminating glacial ice for at least 500 years. These results are significant because this landscape is similar to parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Antarctic Peninsula, indicating that the interactions seen in this area are applicable to modern glaciated regions.

Siberia is impacted by recent climate warming and experiences extreme hydroclimate events. We present a 220-year-long sub-decadal stable oxygen isotope record of diatoms from Lake Khamra. Our analysis identifies winter precipitation as the key process impacting the isotope variability. Two possible hydroclimatic anomalies were found to coincide with significant changes in lake internal conditions and increased wildfire activity in the region.

The Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO) is an enigmatic global warming event with scarce terrestrial records. To contribute, this study presents a new comprehensive geochemical record of the MECO in the fluvial Escanilla Formation, Spain. In addition to identifying the regional preservation of the MECO, results demonstrate continental sedimentary successions, as key archives of past climate and stable isotopes, to be a powerful tool in correlating difficult-to-date fluvial successions.

The Mt Samalas eruption had global-scale impacts on climate and has been linked to historical events throughout latter half of the 13th century. Using model simulations and multi-proxy data, we constrain the year and season of the eruption to summer 1257 and investigate the regional-scale variability in surface cooling following the eruption. We also evaluate our model-to-proxy comparison framework and discuss current limitations of the approach.

This study presents the chronologies from the new Mount Brown South ice cores from East Antarctica, which were developed by counting annual layers in the ice core data and aligning these to volcanic sulfate signatures. The uncertainty in the dating is quantified, and we discuss initial results from seasonal cycle analysis and mean annual concentrations. The chronologies will underpin the development of new proxy records for East Antarctica spanning the past millennium.

We constructed 160 kyr long mono-specific stacks of δ¹³C and of δ¹⁸O from the wider tropics from the planktic foraminifera G. ruber and/or T. sacculifer and compared them with carbon cycle simulations using the BICYCLE-SE model. In our stacks and our model-based interpretation, we cannot detect a species-specific isotopic fractionation during hard-shell formation as a function of carbonate chemistry in the surrounding seawater, something which is called a carbonate ion effect.

The newly developed series of wheat, rye, barley, and oats prices from Sušice (southwestern Bohemia) for the period 1725–1824 CE is used to demonstrate effects of weather, climate, socio-economic, and societal factors on their fluctuations, with particular attention paid to years with extremely high prices. Cold spring temperatures and wet conditions from winter to summer were reflected in very high grain prices.

The Great Plains host the single most important climatic boundary in North America, separating the humid east from the semi-arid west. How this boundary will move as the world warms holds implications for the societies and ecosystems of the Plains. We study how this boundary changed in the past during a period of globally warmer temperatures. We find that this climatic boundary appears to be in the same location as today, suggesting that the Great Plains climate is resilient to global changes.

Elevated atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and a smaller Antarctic Ice Sheet during the mid-Pliocene (~ 3 million years ago) cause the Southern Ocean surface to become fresher and warmer, which affects the global ocean circulation. The CO₂ concentration and the smaller Antarctic Ice Sheet both have a similar and approximately equal impact on the Southern Ocean. The conditions of the Southern Ocean in the mid-Pliocene could therefore be analogous to those in a future climate with smaller ice sheets.

Analysing a sediment record from Stóra Viðarvatn (NE Iceland), we reveal how natural factors and human activities influenced environmental changes (erosion, wildfires) over the last 11 000 years. We found increased fire activity around 3000 and 1500 years ago, predating human settlement, likely driven by natural factors like precipitation shifts. Declining summer temperatures increased erosion vulnerability, exacerbated by farming and animal husbandry, which in turn may have reduced wildfires.