The last British-Irish Ice Sheet (BIIS) created a landscape with many sedimentary basins that preserve archives of paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic change during the Last Glacial-Interglacial Transition (LGIT; ~ 18-8 ka BP). typical lithostratigraphic succession these is composed minerogenic/allogenic sediments formed cold climatic conditions organic-rich/authigenic warmer climates. This pa...

Based on elevated concentrations of a set of "impact markers" at the onset of the Younger Dryas stadial from sedimentary contexts across North America, Firestone, Kennett, West, and others have argued that 12.9 ka the Earth experienced an impact by an extraterrestrial body, an event that had devastating ecological consequences for humans, plants, and animals in the New World [Firestone RB, et a...

Sources and timing of freshwater forcing relative to hydroclimate shifts recorded in Greenland ice cores at the onset of Younger Dryas, ∼12,800 years ago, remain speculative. Here we show that progressive Fennoscandian Ice Sheet (FIS) melting 13,100-12,880 years ago generates a hydroclimate dipole with drier-colder conditions in Northern Europe and wetter-warmer conditions in Greenland. FIS mel...

A method for systematically deriving simple nonlinear dynamical models from ice-core data is proposed. It offers a tool to integrate models and theories with paleoclimatic data. The method is based on the unscented Kalman filter, a nonlinear extension of the conventional Kalman filter. Here, we adopt the abstract conceptual model of stochastically driven motion in a potential that allows for tw...

Phase relations between climate variables are critical in order to ascertain the main mechanisms driving glaciation cycles. Proxy records from ice cores are commonly assumed to represent annual mean averages. These averages, however, may be biased toward a particular season due, for example, to a change in the distribution of precipitation. We demonstrate using a nine-box model of the climate s...

One explanation for the abrupt increases in atmospheric CH4, that occurred repeatedly during the last glacial cycle involves clathrate destabalization events. Because marine clathrates have a distinct deuterium/hydrogen (D/H) isotope ratio, any such destabilization event should cause the D/H ratio of atmospheric CH4 (deltaD(CH4)) to increase. Analyses of air trapped in the ice from the second G...

Whereas fossil evidence indicates extensive treeless vegetation and diverse grazing megafauna in Europe and northern Asia during the last glacial, experiments combining vegetation models and climate models have to-date simulated widespread persistence of trees. Resolving this conflict is key to understanding both last glacial ecosystems and extinction of most of the mega-herbivores. Using a dyn...

Abrupt transitions between cold/dry stadial and warm/wet interstadial states occurred during glacial periods in the absence of any known external forcing. The climate record preserved in polar glaciers, mountain glaciers, and widespread cave deposits reveals that these events were global in extent with temporal distribution implying an underlying memoryless process with millennial time scale. H...