Quantitative Terrestrial Palaeoclimatic Records From Iceland: A Comparison With Marine Data.

Despite being a key area in which to investigate past and present climate change there is currently a lack of terrestrially-derived climatic reconstructions from Iceland. The analysis of subfossil chironomid remains, present in lake sediments, offers an excellent opportunity to produce high-resolution palaeoclimatic reconstructions from this climatically sensitive area. Recent work on subfossil chironomids from Iceland has shown that they can provide a reliable estimate of July air temperatures, especially temperature trends, even if the error terms still tend to overlap with the magnitude of recent Holocene temperature changes. They are however best used as part of a multi-proxy, multi-site study where other proxies are able to support the changes inferred based on analysis of the subfossil chironomids. Multi-proxy (chironomid, pollen and sedimentological) data from three sites in the north of Iceland are compared with palaeoclimatic records from marine sediments. Application of the Icelandic chironomid-mean July air temperature transfer function (Langdon, unpub.) to the chironomid data enable direct comparisons between the datasets from Iceland and the North Atlantic. These suggest that the quantitative Holocene temperature reconstructions produced from the chironomid data are reliable providing a relatively close match between the marine and terrestrial records. This allows evaluation of potential climate forcing mechanisms of the periods under analysis.