Abstract

Temperature reconstructions derived from natural climate archives are in most cases based on „proxy“ information; for instance some property of an organism or ecosystem indirectly influenced by temperature. However, often other processes than temperature also impact the proxy information in archives such as growth and seasonality effects, species-specific fractionations, modern analogue problems or diagenetic alterations. Also the classical ice core temperature reconstruction using stable water isotopes (although being not based on biological information) can be suffering severely from such proxy effects.

In my talk I will discuss the problems with the classical stable water isotope proxy and will present new avenues for temperature reconstructions on ice cores based on stringent physical processes. These allow not only the calibration of the classical local temperature records from ice cores, but also provide information of temperature changes in the entire ocean based on a single ice core measurement.