In 1996-1999, with our participation, a number of sections of the bog sediments in Northwestern Russia were studied to develop a chronology of the stages in the vegetation and climate evolution during the Holocene. However, the resulting chronology failed to take into account the error in determining the radiocarbon age arising due to the changes in the concentration of atmospheric radiocarbon. To allow for this error and make the chronology more precise and reliable, here we used C. Bronk Ramsey's model based on comparing the radiocarbon chronology of the surveyed section with the calibration curve chronology. Thanks to this model, we were able to calculate the calibrated (modeled) age span of the entire series of radiocarbon dates that had been previously obtained by us for samples taken from the thickest (6.4-6.7 m) sediment layers of the raised bogs Nikolsko-Lyutinskoe, Shirinsky Mokh, and Sambal'skoe in Northwestern Russia. The deviations of the average annual temperature from its present value (∆T, °C), which had been represented in our earlier works as a graph, were converted into digital values and employed to define the modeled age that is most approximate to the calendar one and the corresponding values of ∆T for all the dated samples. The ∆T values were reconstructed for a period of 200-11000 cal yr. The modeled age of the cooling and warming stages was compared with the age of the stages of low and high solar activity established by counting the number of sunspots and by determining the concentration of cosmogenic isotopes (14C in tree rings of known age and 10Be in polar glaciers). It was revealed that, within the error in the measured values of age and ∆T, the short-term changes in the average annual temperature occurred simultaneously at three sites of the bog sediments under consideration. The identified changes in the average annual temperature turned out to be synchronous with similar temperature changes in the Northern Hemisphere over the last 1000 years, as well as with the chronologies developed from the GISP 2 polar ice cores and the mountain glacier advances. In general, the comparison of the modeled age of the cooling stages with the corresponding grand minima of solar activity demonstrates the synchronicity of the periods of cooling and low solar activity during the Holocene. It was concluded that short-term climate change depends mainly on variations in solar activity, which is important for predicting and modeling climate shifts.

Translated title of the contributionChronology of the Short-Term Climate Change during the Holocene in Northwestern Russia and Its Correlation with the Solar Activity Variations
Original languageRussian
Pages (from-to)135-165
Number of pages31
JournalUchenye Zapiski Kazanskogo Universiteta. Seriya Estestvennye Nauki
Volume164
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022

    Research areas

  • age correction by modeling, bog sediments, correlation of climate change and solar activity, cosmogenic isotopes, paleoclimatic reconstruction, radiocarbon dating

    Scopus subject areas

  • Agricultural and Biological Sciences(all)
  • Chemistry(all)
  • Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all)
  • Earth and Planetary Sciences(all)

ID: 99749301