Global synthesis of surface conditions and climate trends during the MIS11 interglacial (GLOSINT11)

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Marine Isotope Stage 11 (MIS11), ~400,000 years ago, provides the nearest analog to the Holocene in terms of the configuration of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun and the resulting insolation. Because of the low precessional forcing, as the Earth’s eccentricity was at a minimum, the relative importance of other climatic factors like greenhouse gases may have been higher during MIS11 than during other warm periods and comparable to the Holocene without anthropogenic effects. For these reasons, MIS11 represents a promising ground for testing climate models. As yet, palaeoclimatic data that could be used for such data-model comparison are scattered through the literature and no synoptic picture of the surface conditions and spatial patterns of climate trends exists for MIS11. The aim of this project is to synthesize existing marine, terrestrial and ice-core records of key surface conditions (temperature, humidity) throughout the unusually long MIS11 interglacial and establish the spatial and temporal patterns of surface condition anomalies. This synthesis will allow us to test whether interhemispheric and tropical-to-pole temperature gradients at the Earth’s surface were comparable to the Holocene and whether the trends of climate change during MIS11 were more consistent with insolation or greenhouse gas forcing.