Millennial climatic changes in US and European loess deposits: Links between continental, North Atlantic and Greenland records.

Loess sequences are key deposits at mid-latitudes in N Hemisphere, where no other complete records of past climatic changes are available. US and European sequences are thus ideally located to contribute testing the impact of abrupt climatic changes, described from North Atlantic and Greenland, as modeled by Ganopolski and Rahmstorf (2001). We present a synthesis of our high-resolution investigations in both continents by focusing on MIS 3 and 2. We show that the dust sedimentation, which lead to the loess formation, did not happen regularly, but better followed the dust deposition in Greenland corresponding to strong variations in the atmospheric circulation. Indeed all studied sequences show the alternation of pure or laminated loess with paleosols corresponding to artic brown soils, tundra gleys or embryonic gleys. Thus using i) grain size studies, ii) OSL and AMS dates, iii) d13C and mollusk analyses, and iv) the stratigraphical schemes and ongoing modeling experiments, we show that N Hemisphere loess sequences recorded millennial climatic variations even though with differences from one side to the other of the North Atlantic: while the general climatic history is recorded, the magnitude of the eolian events indicates differences. For example the strong N Atlantic coolings events (HE), expressed in the grain size studies by coarser material in Europe, cannot be identified in the US Great Plains. On the contrary, DO events are recorded by paleosols corresponding to finer sedimentation or stops/reductions in the dust deposition as also observed in the Greenland ice-cores. We conclude that climate variability in Western Europe appears strongly correlated with that in the North Atlantic area, at timescales at least as fine as centuries, while partly in North America.