NOAA/WDS Paleoclimatology - Mid-latitude Temperature Reconstructions from Eastern North America, Europe, and the North Atlantic during the last 8000 years

In recent decades, Europe has warmed rapidly while a prominent ‘warming hole’ has muted changes in eastern North America. Paradoxically, the pattern coincides with cooling in the North Atlantic, even though ocean cooling is commonly expected to chill Europe, not North America. The regional departures from global trends and expectations may have informative precedents in millennial-scale climate anomalies during the Holocene. Here, circum-Atlantic records reveal that counter-intuitive European warming developed amid rapid cooling of the North Atlantic and North America from 5.8-4.8 ka and after 2.2 ka. The anomalies track rapid reductions in the flow of North Atlantic Deep Water southwest of Iceland and appear in independent but highly correlated records of mean sea-surface temperatures, continental temperatures, and hydroclimate changes from both sides of the Atlantic. The patterns confirm the importance of millennial climate variability during the Holocene and the risk of climate disruptions around the North Atlantic today.