COMPARISON OF TERRESTRIAL AND MARINE RECORDS OF CHANGING CLIMATE OF THE LAST 500,000 YEARS

A broad correspondence between long pollen sequences and the deep-sea oxygen isotope record has been noted for some time, but there has been little effort to explore just how similar the two types of evidence a re in terms of their overall structure on glacial-interglacial timesca les and also how they may differ. These questions have profound import ance both for how we view the stratigraphic record of changing climate in different regions and for our understanding of the climate system. Here we link the four longest European pollen records and derive a te rrestrial sequence of vegetation events and a coherent stratigraphic s cheme for the last 500,000 years. Comparison of the terrestrial and ma rine records shows good agreement, but it also reveals that the pollen sequences contain a higher degree of climate sensitivity than the oxy gen isotope record. In addition, it suggests that neither an oxygen is otope record nor a Milankovitch-forced ice volume model may provide an appropriate template for fine-tuning the terrestrial record and that better chronologies will depend on an improved understanding of contro ls on sedimentation rates in individual sedimentary basins. (C) 1997 E lsevier Science B.V.