The wealth and increasing precision of palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental datasets generated over the last decades, from varied terrestrial, marine and ice core archives, has produced an extremely detailed record of spatial and temporal climate variability on decadal to millennial timescales. An expanding tool kit of palaeoclimate proxies and models is revealing the complexity of local environmental system responses to abrupt climate transitions, and highlights the need to improve our understanding of global climate teleconnections. To diagnose the mechanisms behind past abrupt transitions, requires i. chronologically precise comparisons of independent proxy records (within and between archives), ii. models of atmosphere-ocean-biosphere processes, and iii. a better understanding of proxy-sensitivities to different aspects of climate and environmental change (e.g. temperature, precipitation, nutrient availability, sunlight). Twenty years after the first INTIMATE event stratigraphy was proposed (Björck et al., 1998), this session invites contributions from those researchers continuing the exploration of the spatio-temporal complexity of abrupt climate changes over the last glacial cycle. We particularly welcome contributions that explore climate system and proxy behaviours through combined or comparative studies of physical models with ice core, marine or terrestrial proxy records.

Reference: Björck, S., Walker, M. J. C., Cwynar, L. C., Johnsen, S., Knudsen, K.-L., Lowe, J. J. and Wohlfarth, B. (1998), An event stratigraphy for the Last Termination in the North Atlantic region based on the Greenland ice-core record: a proposal by the INTIMATE group. J. Quaternary Sci., 13: 283–292.