Decadal Sea Surface Temperature Variability in the Eastern Mediterranean During the Last Interglacial

Summary Understanding the climate variability from geological periods with warmer-than-present climate is of great relevance for understanding the climate of the future warmer world. The Last Interglacial (LIG; ∼130,000 to 116,000 years ago) is the most recent geologic period with warmer-than-present climate, where climate reconstructions from the LIG provide an opportunity to evaluate climate variability from a warmer world. However, conventional analytical methodology applied on classical geological archives does not provide access to information on annual and decadal patterns of climate variability. In this study, we apply novel analytics on a unique marine geological archive to generate the first annually to subdecadally resolved continuous millennial-scale record indicative of Earth's climate variability during the last warmer-than-present interglacial. We will examine the naturally occurring cyclicity and variability of sea surface temperature and constrain the rate of SST change on decadal to centennial time-scales in the warmer-than-present LIG in the Eastern Mediterranean.