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      Timing and climate forcing of volcanic eruptions for the past 2,500 years.

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          Abstract

          Volcanic eruptions contribute to climate variability, but quantifying these contributions has been limited by inconsistencies in the timing of atmospheric volcanic aerosol loading determined from ice cores and subsequent cooling from climate proxies such as tree rings. Here we resolve these inconsistencies and show that large eruptions in the tropics and high latitudes were primary drivers of interannual-to-decadal temperature variability in the Northern Hemisphere during the past 2,500 years. Our results are based on new records of atmospheric aerosol loading developed from high-resolution, multi-parameter measurements from an array of Greenland and Antarctic ice cores as well as distinctive age markers to constrain chronologies. Overall, cooling was proportional to the magnitude of volcanic forcing and persisted for up to ten years after some of the largest eruptive episodes. Our revised timescale more firmly implicates volcanic eruptions as catalysts in the major sixth-century pandemics, famines, and socioeconomic disruptions in Eurasia and Mesoamerica while allowing multi-millennium quantification of climate response to volcanic forcing.

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          Most cited references75

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          2500 years of European climate variability and human susceptibility.

          Climate variations influenced the agricultural productivity, health risk, and conflict level of preindustrial societies. Discrimination between environmental and anthropogenic impacts on past civilizations, however, remains difficult because of the paucity of high-resolution paleoclimatic evidence. We present tree ring-based reconstructions of central European summer precipitation and temperature variability over the past 2500 years. Recent warming is unprecedented, but modern hydroclimatic variations may have at times been exceeded in magnitude and duration. Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity. Increased climate variability from ~250 to 600 C.E. coincided with the demise of the western Roman Empire and the turmoil of the Migration Period. Such historical data may provide a basis for counteracting the recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change.
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            Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years

            T Crowley (2000)
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              Eemian interglacial reconstructed from a Greenland folded ice core.

              Efforts to extract a Greenland ice core with a complete record of the Eemian interglacial (130,000 to 115,000 years ago) have until now been unsuccessful. The response of the Greenland ice sheet to the warmer-than-present climate of the Eemian has thus remained unclear. Here we present the new North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling ('NEEM') ice core and show only a modest ice-sheet response to the strong warming in the early Eemian. We reconstructed the Eemian record from folded ice using globally homogeneous parameters known from dated Greenland and Antarctic ice-core records. On the basis of water stable isotopes, NEEM surface temperatures after the onset of the Eemian (126,000 years ago) peaked at 8 ± 4 degrees Celsius above the mean of the past millennium, followed by a gradual cooling that was probably driven by the decreasing summer insolation. Between 128,000 and 122,000 years ago, the thickness of the northwest Greenland ice sheet decreased by 400 ± 250 metres, reaching surface elevations 122,000 years ago of 130 ± 300 metres lower than the present. Extensive surface melt occurred at the NEEM site during the Eemian, a phenomenon witnessed when melt layers formed again at NEEM during the exceptional heat of July 2012. With additional warming, surface melt might become more common in the future.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Nature
                Nature
                1476-4687
                0028-0836
                Jul 30 2015
                : 523
                : 7562
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Desert Research Institute, Nevada System of Higher Education, Reno, Nevada 89512, USA.
                [2 ] Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA.
                [3 ] Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
                [4 ] School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK.
                [5 ] Yale Climate and Energy Institute, and Department of History, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.
                [6 ] 1] Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, 8903 Birmensdorf, Switzerland [2] Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, 3012 Bern, Switzerland [3] Global Change Research Centre AS CR, 60300 Brno, Czech Republic.
                [7 ] 1] Department of Physics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA [2] Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA.
                [8 ] Centre for Ice and Climate, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark.
                [9 ] 1] Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, 3012 Bern, Switzerland [2] Climate and Environmental Physics, University of Bern, 3012 Bern, Switzerland.
                [10 ] Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung, 27570 Bremerhaven, Germany.
                [11 ] Department of History, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK.
                [12 ] Department of Geology, Quaternary Sciences, Lund University, 22362 Lund, Sweden.
                [13 ] British Antarctic Survey, Natural Environment Research Council, Cambridge CB3 0ET, UK.
                [14 ] The Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA.
                [15 ] Department of Physics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA.
                Article
                nature14565
                10.1038/nature14565
                26153860
                f39a56ad-f5f0-4142-8109-bad1091fa5a2
                History

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