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This book provides a major synthesis of evidence for past climate variability at the regional and continental scale across Europe and Africa. It focuses on two complementary time-scales, the Holocene (approximately the last 11,500 years) and the last glacial-interglacial cycle (approximately the last 130,000 years). An overview of the climate system of the past has never been attempted before on this scale, and, as such, the volume represents a benchmark for future research.
It is written by an expert group of climate change scientists and presents an insight into past climate variability that challenges climatologists who seek to explain climate dynamics of the past and provides climate modellers with a work of reference for data-model comparison. The book is an advanced but very readable text essential for all students and scientists interested in global environmental change.
From the contents:Introduction.- Archives and Proxies along the PEP III Transect.- Oceanic Climate Variability at Millennial Time-Scales: Models of Climate Connections.- Between Agulhas and Benguela: responses of Southern African climates of the Late Pleistocene to current fluxes, orbital precession and the extent of the Circum-Antarctic vortex.- Holocene climatic trends and rhythms in southern Africa.- Diatom productivity in Northern Lake Malawi during the past 25,000 years: implications for the position of the intertropical convergence zone at millennial and shorter time scales.- Late Quaternary climatic variability in intertropical Africa.- Decadal and century-scale climate variability in tropical Africa during the past 2000 years.- Late Quaternary climate changes in the Horn of Africa.- Palaeoenvironments, palaeoclimates and landscape development in Atlantic Equatorial Africa: a review of key sites covering the last 25 kyrs.- Aspects of Nigerian coastal vegetation in the Holocene: some recent insights.- Palaeoenvironmental changes in the arid and sub arid belt (Sahara-Sahel-Arabian Peninsula) from 150 kyr to present.- Historical chronology of ENSO and the Nile flood record.- Groundwater as an archive of climatic and environmental change: Europe to Africa.- Mediterranean Sea palaeohydrology and pluvial periods during the Late Quaternary.
From the reviews: "This volume presents an impressive overview of the range of ongoing paleoclimate research along the whole Afro-European transect ! . This volume represents another highlight of the international efforts on improving our understanding of global change. ! Overall, the volume is very well edited, including the figures. ! The editors have to be congratulated for their excellent work." (Vera Markgraf, Journal of Paleolimnology, Vol. 36, 2006)
