Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Permissions
- 1 Defining and exploring the key questions
- 2 An introduction to models and modelling
- 3 The palaeo-record: approaches, timeframes and chronology
- 4 The Palaeo-record: archives, proxies and calibration
- 5 Glacial and interglacial worlds
- 6 The transition from the last glacial maximum to the Holocene
- 7 The Holocene
- 8 The Anthropocene – a changing atmosphere
- 9 The Anthropocene – changing land
- 10 The Anthropocene: changing aquatic environments and ecosystems
- 11 Changing biodiversity
- 12 Detection and attribution
- 13 Future global mean temperatures and sea-level
- 14 From the global to the specific
- 15 Impacts and vulnerability
- 16 Sceptics, responses and partial answers
- References
- Index
7 - The Holocene
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Permissions
- 1 Defining and exploring the key questions
- 2 An introduction to models and modelling
- 3 The palaeo-record: approaches, timeframes and chronology
- 4 The Palaeo-record: archives, proxies and calibration
- 5 Glacial and interglacial worlds
- 6 The transition from the last glacial maximum to the Holocene
- 7 The Holocene
- 8 The Anthropocene – a changing atmosphere
- 9 The Anthropocene – changing land
- 10 The Anthropocene: changing aquatic environments and ecosystems
- 11 Changing biodiversity
- 12 Detection and attribution
- 13 Future global mean temperatures and sea-level
- 14 From the global to the specific
- 15 Impacts and vulnerability
- 16 Sceptics, responses and partial answers
- References
- Index
Summary
The transition to the Holocene
As the previous chapter has shown, the ice-core records from each of the poles provide contrasted templates for the transition from glacial to interglacial, Holocene conditions. In Greenland, the final transition appears to have been completed within a few decades, with most of the change in isotopically inferred temperature taking place in two jumps, each lasting less than a decade (Figure 6.3). The remarkable coherence between the Greenland records and those from Europe and around the North Atlantic (Figure 6.2) suggests that similarly rapid changes took place over a wide area. The question of just how widespread this pattern of change was is not yet fully resolved, but there is well dated evidence to suggest that it extended south as far as Patagonia (Hajdas et al., 2003). Denton and Hendy (1994) claimed that the sequence of changes at the end of the last glacial in New Zealand are synchronous and parallel to the northern-hemisphere pattern, though not all lines of evidence accord with this view (McGlone, 1995).
Although the beginning of the Holocene is marked by a sharp boundary in many archives, it was also a point in a long period of transition involving a whole sequence of Earth-system changes that continued for several thousand years. The seasonality and spatial distribution of external insolation continued to change throughout the whole of the Holocene.
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- Environmental ChangeKey Issues and Alternative Perspectives, pp. 118 - 151Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005