Fossil pollen offers insights into past climates, yet results differ depending on reconstruction methods. By comparing multiple approaches across Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum, we highlight how method choice influences outcomes. Our work introduces a new methodological framework that reduces biases and improves the reliability of climate reconstructions.

This study uses lake sediments from Lake Sidi Ali in Morocco to understand how climate and the surrounding landscape changed over the past 11,000 years. The results show repeating climate patterns that influenced lake water levels and erosion in the catchment at different timescales. These findings help explain how regional climate and local landscape processes interacted at the North African desert margin.

The end-Permian mass extinction was the most severe loss of life in Earth history, yet the role of ocean oxygen restriction remains debated. We examined rock records from South China and western Canada to track redox conditions before and after the crisis. Oxygen levels were already low prior to the extinction, and widespread seafloor anoxia developed at its peak. Afterwards, ferruginous conditions dominated, reducing nutrient availability, limiting productivity, and slowing life’s recovery.

In this work we implement a feedback mechanism with proposed relevance for Snowball Earth in a simple climate model, a salt-albedo feedback. Our results show that this mechanism could have amplified cooling during the initial phase of Snowball Earth, suggesting it may have played an overlooked role in the climate evolution of Snowball Earth.

During the last ice age, Northern Hemisphere ice sheets reshaped global climate. They shifted North Atlantic winds southward, increasing summer rainfall across Eurasia. They also altered tropical and Southern Hemisphere weather patterns, affecting rainfall far beyond the ice-covered regions. Our results show that the height and shape of the ice sheets had a much greater influence on global wind and rainfall patterns than changes in Earth’s orbit, greenhouse gases, or surface reflectivity.

The currently observed climate changes are most intense in the Arctic region. This study utilized some of the oldest existing meteorological measurement series in this region. Atmospheric pressure and anemological conditions were analysed and then compared with contemporary measurements. This showed that the weakest low and strongest high systems occur in the same months. Prevailing wind directions have also remained unchanged, while the northerly wind carries less frigid air than in the past.

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is an important driver of year-to-year weather variability in Europe and North America, but its behavior on longer timescales is disputed. We present a new reconstruction of the NAO over the last millennium using water isotope proxy data from ice cores, speleothems, trees, and other archives. We find pronounced but irregular multidecadal to centennial variability. Better accounting for such variability in climate models is crucial to better project future climate.

We generated five new and compiled previously published Holocene temperature timeseries from southwestern Greenland. We found temperature maxima between 7500 and 5000 years ago, with temperatures approx. 2–5 °C higher than 1994–2024. Afterward, temperatures gradually cooled towards the present, following maximum summer insolation. Local variations in the magnitude and timing of the thermal maximum are related to topography and proximity to the ice sheet and the ocean.

The article discusses (i) a recently discovered series of meteorological measurements (air temperature, precipitation, pressure, humidity, wind direction, and force) taken in Wrocław, South-Western Poland, from 1773–81, and (ii) an analysis of air temperature. This unique, quality-controlled series, verified against data from Silesia (Żagań and Jelenia Góra) and Warsaw, extends Wrocław's regular temperature records back to 1773, previously starting in 1791.

Did Scandinavian glaciers survive the warmer conditions of the early Holocene? Ice thickness measurements, proglacial lake sediment, and cosmogenic nuclides in bedrock alongside Riukojietna, a small low-elevation ice cap in northern Sweden, all combine to constrain a glacier advance and retreat history since 9.8 thousand years ago. Riukojietna was small but persisted through the early Holocene, illustrating that other but higher-elevation valley glaciers in the region may also have done so.

Arctic Pleistocene benthic foraminifers show distinct temporal and spatial distribution patterns in the Arctic Ocean. We refine previously applied calcareous benthic foraminiferal bioevents and correlated them with lithology changes and independent stratigraphic markers. Benthic foraminifera colonized the Arctic Ocean via advection of Atlantic water and ecological requirements must have been met locally for the species to settle. Yet, bioevents also reflect significant diagenetic loss.

We show how measurements of nitrogen isotopes in Antarctic ice core records can be used to show dramatic thinning of an ice sheet during ice mass changes in the Holocene. Combining such measurements with proxies for ice sheet elevation could be a powerful tool for constraining the history of ice dynamics at sites which are sensitive to rapid changes, and could contribute to constraining ice sheet models.

Accurate information about the surface ocean temperatures are important for understanding Earth's climate history. Here, we correct a sea surface temperature record from the critical subarctic North Pacific region for systematic biases introduced into the algal-biomarker-based geologic temperature estimates by the analytical method used by the original study.

The paper provides an updated analysis of Poland's climate, focusing on the 16th century using a multiproxy approach (documentary evidence and dendrochronological data). Newly gathered historical sources and dendrochronological data helped reconstruct five updated mean air temperature series: decadal winter and summer means from documentary evidence, and annual means for winter and late winter–early spring derived from dendrochronological data.

Studying the Pliocene (5.33–2.58 Ma) is key to understanding Earth’s climate under current atmospheric CO₂ levels and the development of permanent Northern Hemisphere ice. We used ocean sediments and improved laboratory methods to reconstruct sea surface temperatures from Ocean Drilling Program Site 1090 (south Atlantic) from ~4.3–2.6 Ma. Our data suggests cooling patterns similar to those found worldwide, suggesting a global forcing, like decreased CO₂, triggered the shift to the ice ages.

To better understand climate drivers during a warm period ~200,000 years ago, we reconstructed global surface temperature using 132 marine records placed on a common timeline. We found strong hemispheric differences and showed that the warmest phase occurred despite lower CO₂ levels. In addition, we suggest that extreme orbital forcing temporarily shifted the climate into the older 41,000-year rhythm, resulting in a hybrid warm period shaped by both 100,000-year and 41,000-year climate dynamics.

During the mid-Miocene (~16 to 14 million years ago), Earth was much warmer with CO₂ levels similar to what is expected for our future. Here, we perform simulations with a new geography of the mid-Miocene, which include changes in ice coverage, land and sea distribution, solar energy and CO₂ concentrations. Despite high CO₂ concentrations, our mid-Miocene is too cold compared to geological reconstructions, but shows great potential to understand future climate change and its sensitivity to CO₂.