High-resolution climate reconstruction for the holocene based on growth chronologies of the bivalve Arctica Islandica from the North Sea

Abstract

High-resolution climate reconstruction, North Sea, annual banded proxy, Arctica islandica. - Until now, there has been no published documentation of North Sea year-to-year climate variability during the last 8000 to 10000 years. High-resolution instrumental time series of climatic and environmental data for the North Sea and the adjacent North Atlantic are only available for the last decades or a century at best. Long term paleoclimatic reconstructions in higher latitudes have been predominantly undertaken using land-based annually banded archives, such as trees, varves, glaciers, and speleothems. A suitable long-term environmental archive with annual may be provided by CaCO3-skeletons of long-lived marine invertebrates. This study evaluates whether recent and subfossil shells of the long-lived bivalve Arctica islandica from the North Sea carry feasible information on Holocene climatic and oceanographic conditions. I compared modern shells of Arctica islandica from two very different habitats, a near-coastal shallow site (German Bight) and a northerly, more central, deep site (Fladen Ground). From the latter, subfossil shells were analysed, also. This study demonstrates that Arctica from both sites provides suitable archives of marine environmental conditions in the form of (i) variations in annual shell ...