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SUMMARY:Mid-Holocene climate and environmental changes revealed by subfoss
 il wood from eastern England - Tatiana Bebchuk\, University of Cambridge
DTSTART:20250521T163000Z
DTEND:20250521T180000Z
UID:TALK231781@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:91369
DESCRIPTION:To better understand current climate trends and extremes and t
 heir potential environmental impacts\, annually resolved and absolutely da
 ted proxy archives are required\, but their quality and quantity decrease 
 drastically back in time with only a few such records available before the
  Common Era.\nIn this talk\, we will learn from living and relict trees ab
 out climate and environmental conditions in eastern England and beyond fro
 m the present back to the mid-Holocene.\nI will introduce a vast\, yet rap
 idly disappearing archive of thousands of exceptionally well-preserved sub
 fossil oak and yew trunks in eastern England. Using dendrochronological\, 
 radiocarbon and isotopic dating\, we anchor oak and yew tree-ring chronolo
 gies between 5\,200 and 4\,200 years ago. We further develop an eco-physio
 logical model based on yew tree-ring stable carbon and oxygen isotopes to 
 reconstruct mid-Holocene hydroclimate variability. We show that contrary t
 o today's climate-growth relationships\, relatively dry soil and atmospher
 ic conditions in the mid-Holocene favoured yew growth\, while higher groun
 dwater tables and wetter soils reduced ring width formation. We propose th
 at yew woodlands disappeared around 4\,200 years ago due to the combined e
 ffects of rapid sea-level rise in the North Sea\, a prolonged negative pha
 se of the North Atlantic Oscillation\, and significant riverine flooding. 
 These hydroclimatic and biogeographic changes in eastern England\, togethe
 r with independent evidence from pollen records and lake sediments\, shed 
 new lights on the yet debated 4.2 ka climate anomaly\, typically associate
 d with extreme drought in central Asia. Intriguingly\, our new subfossil F
 enland record implies unusually humid and stormy conditions for the North 
 Atlantic/European region during this period.
LOCATION:Latimer Room\, Clare College
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