Rapid climate change and no-analog vegetation in lowland Central America during the last 86,000 years
Date
2012Author
Correa-Metrio, Alexander
Bush, Mark B.
Cabrera, Kenneth R.
Sully, Shannon
Brenner, Mark
Hodell, David A.
Escobar, Jaime
Guilderson, Tom
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Abstract
Glacialeinterglacial climate cycles are known to have triggered migrations and reassortments of tropical
biota. Although long-term precessionally-driven changes in temperature and precipitation have been
demonstrated using tropical sediment records, responses to abrupt climate changes, e.g. the cooling of
Heinrich stadials or warmings of the deglaciation, are poorly documented. The best predictions of future
forest responses to ongoing warming will rely on evaluating the influences of both abrupt and long-term
climate changes on past ecosystems. A sedimentary sequence recovered from Lake Petén-Itzá, Guatemalan lowlands, provided a natural archive of environmental history. Pollen and charcoal analyses were
used to reconstruct the vegetation and climate history of the area during the last 86,000 years. We found
that vegetation composition and air temperature were strongly influenced by millennial-scale changes in
the North Atlantic Ocean. Whereas Greenland warm interstadials were associated with warm and
relatively wet conditions in the Central American lowlands, cold Greenland stadials, especially those
associated with Heinrich events, caused extremely dry and cold conditions. Even though the vegetation
seemed to have been highly resilient, plant associations without modern analogs emerged mostly
following sharp climate pulses of either warmth or cold, and were paralleled by exceptionally high rates
of ecological change. Although pulses of temperature change are evident in this 86,000-year record none
matched the rates projected for the 21st Century. According to our findings, the ongoing rapid warming
will cause no-modern-analog communities, which given the improbability of returning to lower-thanmodern CO2 levels, anthropogenic barriers to migration, and increased anthropogenic fires, will pose
immense threats to the biodiversity of the region.
Link to resource
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.01.025Collections
- Año 2012 [126]
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