Mid to late Holocene sea-surface temperature reconstruction using fossil corals from Kume Island, Ryukyu, Japan

The relative warmth and stability of the Holocene was punctuated by several brief cold events. Although these cold events on a global scale are widely reported, the lack of records from regions such as the East China Sea (ECS) results in an incomplete understanding of the underlying cooling mechanism. Late Quaternary climate anomaly, at around 4.2 ka evidence found in elsewhere, is a time of such abrupt climate change, and mechanisms of this event have not been understood. Here, we present a coral-based paleo-SST (sea-surface temperature) reconstruction from the ECS to unveil Holocene variability in strength of the Kuroshio Western Boundary Current and the East Asian Monsoon (EAM). Our new data confirm that cold conditions prevailed at 3.8 cal kyr BP, and were started after 4.5 cal kyr BP. The timing of this cold event is consistent with previously reported Pulleniatina Minimum Event (PME, 4.5-3.0 ka) (e.g., Ujiié and Ujiié, 1999). While PME had not been resolved seasonality, our high-resolution data clearly indicate a different seasonal response of summer and winter SST . This result provides an important insight into the mechanism of the millennium scale cold event in the ECS, where the region affected by EAM (Seki et al., 2012).