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Science 26 September 2003:
Vol. 301. no. 5641, pp. 1890 - 1893
DOI: 10.1126/science.1088568
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Reports

Cyclic Variation and Solar Forcing of Holocene Climate in the Alaskan Subarctic

Feng Sheng Hu,1,2,3* Darrell Kaufman,4 Sumiko Yoneji,1 David Nelson,2 Aldo Shemesh,5 Yongsong Huang,6 Jian Tian,3 Gerard Bond,7 Benjamin Clegg,1 Thomas Brown8

High-resolution analyses of lake sediment from southwestern Alaska reveal cyclic variations in climate and ecosystems during the Holocene. These variations occurred with periodicities similar to those of solar activity and appear to be coherent with time series of the cosmogenic nuclides 14C and 10Be as well as North Atlantic drift ice. Our results imply that small variations in solar irradiance induced pronounced cyclic changes in northern high-latitude environments. They also provide evidence that centennial-scale shifts in the Holocene climate were similar between the subpolar regions of the North Atlantic and North Pacific, possibly because of Sun-ocean-climate linkages.

1 Department of Plant Biology, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
2 Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
3 Department of Geology, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
4 Departments of Geology and Environmental Sciences, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011, USA.
5 Department of Environmental Sciences, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
6 Department of Geological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
7 Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, NY 10964, USA.
8 Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry–Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94551, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: fshu{at}life.uiuc.edu

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