Aim Although climatic fluctuations occurred world-wide during the Pleistocene, the severity of glacial and drought events – and hence their influence on animal and plant biogeography – differed among regions. Many Holarctic species were forced to warmer-climate refugia during glacial periods, leaving the genetic signature of recent expansion and gene flow among modern-day populations. Montane s...

Global carbon cycle perturbations throughout Earth history are frequently linked to changing paleogeography, glaciation, ocean oxygenation, and biological innovation. A pronounced carbonate carbon-isotope excursion during the Ediacaran Period (635 to 542 million years ago), accompanied by invariant or decoupled organic carbon-isotope values, has been explained with a model that relies on a larg...

A multitracer study of a small aquifer in northern Switzerland indicates that the atmosphere in central Europe cooled by at least 5 degreesC during the last glacial period. The relation between oxygen isotope ratios (delta18O) and recharge temperatures reconstructed for this period is similar to the present-day one if a shift in the delta18O value of the oceans during the ice age is taken into ...

A glacial varve chronology from New England spanning the 4000-year period from 17,500 to 13,500 calendar years before the present was analyzed for evidence of climate variability during the late Pleistocene. The chronology shows a distinct interannual (3 to 5 years) band of enhanced variability suggestive of El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) teleconnections into North America during the late ...

Proxy data reveal the existence of episodes of increased deposition of ice-rafted detritus in the North Atlantic Ocean during the last glacial period interpreted as massive iceberg discharges from the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Although these have long been attributed to self-sustained ice sheet oscillations, growing evidence of the crucial role that the ocean plays both for past and future behavior...

Reconstruction of nutrient concentrations in the deep Southern Ocean has produced conflicting results. The cadmium/calcium (Cd/Ca) data set suggests little change in nutrient concentrations during the last glacial period, whereas the carbon isotope data set suggests that nutrient concentrations were higher. We determined the silicon isotope composition of sponge spicules from the Atlantic and P...