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.