Proxy-based reconstructions of past climate variability have mostly concentrated on natural climate archives from the tropical marine realm whereas only very few data are available from non-tropical oceans, albeit recent studies have shown that these sensitive regions have undergone dramatic changes during the past decades threatening unique ecosystems of enormous socio-economic value. Due to the absence of reliable long-term records our knowledge of natural ocean and climate variability in these regions is very limited.

The session aims to address this problem by giving a forum for past climate and ocean variability reconstructions that are based on highly-resolved biogenic archives from the extratropical marine realm (e.g., bivalve molluscs, coralline algae, cold-water corals), but also including terrestrial biogenic archives (e.g., tree rings). This session will focus on reconstructions of important natural climate modes on interannual to centennial time scales and will include studies that resolve the anthropogenically-induced contribution to climate variability in these regions.

Contributions are welcome on state-of-the-art high-resolution geochemical studies, as well as on approaches based on growth pattern analysis (sclerochronology) of biogenic archives, that provide long-term high-resolution records of environmental and climatic change.