Raised bogs, a Climate Shift, Cultural Change, and Reduced Solar Activity in the Early First Millennium BC

Matching of a high resolution sequence of uncalibrated 14C datings with the dendro-calibration curve not only offers improved dating precision, but can also reveal relationships between atmospheric 14C variations and short-term climatic fluctuations caused by variations in solar output. Holocene shifts to cool and wet climate types in the temperate zones often correspond to phases of sharply increasing values of atmospheric radiocarbon, pointing to a link between changing solar activity and climate change. In northwest Europe at ca. 850 BC a sharp climatic shift to cooler, wetter conditions occurred. The shift is reflected in the species composition and decomposition of raised bog deposits and is chronologically linked to cultural changes and migrations at the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition. The temporary sharp rise of the atmospheric 14C content around 800 BC was caused by a sudden decline of solar activity. The solar wind declined, permitting more cosmic rays to penetrate into the atmosphere, and therefore the production of the cosmogenic isotope 14C increased. The climate shift was also recorded in Central and Eastern Europe, with rapid and total flooding of the Upper Volga region and a highstand of the Caspian Sea. In the Mississippi River basin, flooding frequencies greatly increased and there was an abrupt gap in the cultural transition from `Late Archaic' to `Early Woodland'. Paleoclimatological teleconnections point to a considerable role of solar UV in climate forcing. In the Central African rain forest belt and western India there was also a strong climate shift around 850 cal BC, but it was a shift to dryness (weakening of the summer monsoon). A possible palaeoclimatological explanation for the dry-wet transition in the temperate zones, and the contemporaneous wet-dry transition in the tropics (climatic teleconnections) will be given.