Past Interglacial Temperature Regimes (PAINTER): Marine isotope stages 11 in the NE-Atlantic sector

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Within the community of scientists working on climate change it is widely believed that marine isotope stage 11 can in many ways be seen as the Pleistocene equivalent to the recent interglacial conditions of the Holocene. However, in contrast to this perception our own paleoceanographic studies from the high-northern latitudes point to systematic differences in the principle configuration of atmospheric and oceanic circulation during these two interglacial intervals. The goal of this project is therefore to evaluate whether isotopic stage 11 may indeed be taken as the adequate interglacial model to describe present and future Holocene climate change. Using a comparative approach by analysing sea surface conditions during stages 11 and 1 in the Northern Hemisphere we will investigate to what extent a fundamentally different pattern of the North Atlantic Oscillation may have determined the specific climate difference between these two warm periods. In detail, we plan to analyze the climate character of stage 11 and the Holocene with a broad methodological approach using a series of geochemical, micropaleontological, and sedimentological proxies. These methods will be carried out on a number of marine sediment core sites describing a North-South transect in the North Atlantic, i.e from the subpolar to the subtropical region, and including sediment samples from a single site in the western Mediterranean Sea for comparison.