Millennial-scale Land-surface Temperature and Soil Moisture Reconstruction Derived From Last Glacial European Loess Sequences

Abstract The climate of the last 50,000 years has been punctuated by oscillations on millennial-to-centennial timescales. Our understanding of this variability derives predominantly from proxy information in ice and marine cores; high-resolution records from land are scarce. Here we quantify land-surface temperature and soil moisture at millennial timescales over continental Europe, for the period spanning 45,000 to 22,000 years before present. We provide the first quantitative terrestrial counterpart to marine and ice-core derived reconstructions for the North Atlantic region. Our terrestrial reconstruction derives from novel isotopic geochemistry and radiocarbon dating of earthworm calcite granules, collected from two temporally overlapping loess palaeosol sequences in the Rhine Valley, Germany. We combine our proxy reconstructions with mesoscale wind and moisture transport modelling. We find that compared with polar and Mediterranean regions, climatic warming from stadial to interstadial phases is attenuated in central-western Europe. The region was dominated by westerly air masses during the last glacial maximum but experienced seasonal variability in wind steadiness. We observe a strong correlation between abrupt temperature variability recorded in the Greenland ice core and the periglacial environments further south. This correlation is likely due to air masses arriving to the Rhine valley are deriving from the North Atlantic.