Biomarker reconstructions of marine and terrestrial climate signals from marginal marine environments: new results from high-resolution archives

One of the key questions facing climate scientists, policy makers and the public today, is how important is natural variability in explaining global warming? Sedimentary archives from marginal marine environments, such as fjordic (or sea-loch) environments, typically have higher sediment accumulation rates than deeper ocean sites and thus provide suitably expanded archives of the Holocene against which the 20th Century changes can be compared. Moreover, with suitable temporal resolution, the impact of Holocene rapid climate changes episodes, such as the 8.2 kyr event can be constrained. Since fjords bridge the land-ocean interface, palaeo-environmental records from fjordic environments provide a unique opportunity to study the link between marine and terrestrial climate. Here we present millennial to centennial scale, independent records of marine and terrestrial change in two fjordic cores: from Ìsafjardardjúp, northwest Iceland (core MD99-2266; location: 66° 13' 77'' N, 23° 15' 93'' W; 106m water depth) and from Loch Sunart, northwest Scotland (core MD-04 2832; location: 56° 40.19'N, 05° 52.21 W; 50 m water depth). The cores are extremely high resolution with 1cm of sediment representing