• Energy Research

ABSTRACTStratigraphic pollen analysis of terrestrial peat–mud layers from a buried bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) forest allows study of autochthonous fossil pollen profiles from a glacial refugium along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast in the context of fluctuating sea levels. The site is in 18 m of water, offshore from Orange Beach, Alabama, USA. Exposed cypress stumps are in growth position, still rooted in sediment. Radiocarbon dating of peat and optically stimulated luminescence dating of subjacent sediments yielded an age range of 72–45 ka. We hypothesize the site was rapidly buried by floodplain aggradation from pulsed sea‐level rise during the glacial interval. Pollen results from the lowermost peat layer are consistent with a bald cypress − tupelo gum (Nyssa aquatica) backwater forest. This was followed by a brief transitional period where the pollen assemblage is similar to Atlantic Coastal Plain Blackwater Levee/Bar Forests, but may be evidence of a no‐modern analog community. Final Pleistocene pollen spectra indicate a more open environment, dominated by grasses (Poaceae) and sedges (Cyperaceae).

AbstractReproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records are from trees, ice, sediment, corals, speleothems, documentary evidence, and other archives. They range in length from 50 to 2000 years, with a median of 547 years, while temporal resolution ranges from biweekly to centennial. Nearly half of the proxy time series are significantly correlated with HadCRUT4.2 surface temperature over the period 1850–2014. Global temperature composites show a remarkable degree of coherence between high- and low-resolution archives, with broadly similar patterns across archive types, terrestrial versus marine locations, and screening criteria. The database is suited to investigations of global and regional temperature variability over the Common Era, and is shared in the Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format, including serializations in Matlab, R and Python.

Over the past century, the dendrochronology technique of crossdating has been widely used to generate a global network of tree-ring chronologies that serves as a leading indicator of environmental variability and change. Only recently, however, has this same approach been applied to growth increments in calcified structures of bivalves, fish and corals in the world's oceans. As in trees, these crossdated marine chronologies are well replicated, annually resolved and absolutely dated, providing uninterrupted multi-decadal to millennial histories of ocean palaeoclimatic and palaeoecological processes. Moreover, they span an extensive geographical range, multiple trophic levels, habitats and functional types, and can be readily integrated with observational physical or biological records. Increment width is the most commonly measured parameter and reflects growth or productivity, though isotopic and elemental composition capture complementary aspects of environmental variability. As such, crossdated marine chronologies constitute powerful observational templates to establish climate–biology relationships, test hypotheses of ecosystem functioning, conduct multi-proxy reconstructions, provide constraints for numerical climate models, and evaluate the precise timing and nature of ocean–atmosphere interactions. These ‘present–past–future’ perspectives provide new insights into the mechanisms and feedbacks between the atmosphere and marine systems while providing indicators relevant to ecosystem-based approaches of fisheries management.

AbstractThe progress of science is tied to the standardization of measurements, instruments, and data. This is especially true in the Big Data age, where analyzing large data volumes critically hinges on the data being standardized. Accordingly, the lack of community‐sanctioned data standards in paleoclimatology has largely precluded the benefits of Big Data advances in the field. Building upon recent efforts to standardize the format and terminology of paleoclimate data, this article describes the Paleoclimate Community reporTing Standard (PaCTS), a crowdsourced reporting standard for such data. PaCTS captures which information should be included when reporting paleoclimate data, with the goal of maximizing the reuse value of paleoclimate data sets, particularly for synthesis work and comparison to climate model simulations. Initiated by the LinkedEarth project, the process to elicit a reporting standard involved an international workshop in 2016, various forms of digital community engagement over the next few years, and grassroots working groups. Participants in this process identified important properties across paleoclimate archives, in addition to the reporting of uncertainties and chronologies; they also identified archive‐specific properties and distinguished reporting standards for new versus legacy data sets. This work shows that at least 135 respondents overwhelmingly support a drastic increase in the amount of metadata accompanying paleoclimate data sets. Since such goals are at odds with present practices, we discuss a transparent path toward implementing or revising these recommendations in the near future, using both bottom‐up and top‐down approaches.