- 1University of Lausanne, Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics, Lausanne, Switzerland
- 2Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Department of Earth Sciences, Kanpur, India
Quantifying the magnitude of rapid changes in our past climate system is paramount to our awareness of the scale and impact of current and future climate change. While a number of proxies enable surface air temperature reconstructions, methodological limitations and preservation issues limit the spatial coverage and timeframe for which most of these can be sucessfully applied. As a result, for major changes in our climate system like the Pleistocene-Holocene transition including the rapid warming and environmenal adaptions following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the lack of terrestrial records leads to increased uncertainty in reconstructions of continental temperature.
Recently, low-temperature thermoluminescence (TL) signals of feldspar (i.e., 200–280 °C) have been shown to be sensitive to terrestrial temperature fluctuations over geological timescales and can thus inform on past surface temperature in terrestrial settings (Biswas et al., 2020). Using physical principles best known from trapped charge dating, the trapped charge population can be used to infer paleotemperatures in the form of temperature histories through inverse modelling. For this, other time resolved relative temperature records such as the Greenland ice sheet 𝛿18O-, speleothem-, or pollen records can be used as additional constraints.
Applying the TL paleothermometry approach, we present first reconstructions of LGM surface air temperatures at central European study sites. Additionally, we benchmark improvements of the method against samples from stable temperature crustal environments, namely the KTB and MIZ-1 boreholes located in Germany and Japan, respectively. Our ultimate objective is to combine these data with other northern hemisphere samples to improve our understanding of the Euro-African LGM continental surface air temperature.
References
Biswas, R.H., Herman, F., King, G.E., Lehmann, B., Singhvi, A.K., 2020. Surface paleothermometry using low-temperature thermoluminescence of feldspar. Clim. Past 16, 2075-2093.
How to cite: Oehler, S., Schmidt, C., Niyonzima, P., King, G. E., Biswas, R. H., and Herman, F.: Thermoluminescence paleothermometry enables LGM surface temperature reconstruction at central European study sites, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-6215, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-6215, 2025.
