Climate of the Past www.clim-past.net 1814-9324 1814-9332 5 2 2009 10.5194/cp-5-171-2009 http://www.clim-past.net/5/171/2009/ http://www.clim-past.net/5/171/2009/cp-5-171-2009.html http://www.clim-past.net/5/171/2009/cp-5-171-2009.pdf 171 181 2009-05-04 Two millennia of climate variability in the Central Mediterranean C. Taricco taricco@ph.unito.it M. Ghil S. Alessio G. Vivaldo Dipartimento di Fisica Generale dell'Università, and Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario-INAF, Torino, Italy Geosciences Department & Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (CNRS and IPSL), Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences & Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA This experimental work addresses the need for high-resolution, long and homogeneous climatic time series that facilitate the study of climate variability over time scales of decades to millennia. We present a high-resolution record of foraminiferal &delta;¹⁸O from a Central-Mediterranean sediment core that covers the last two millennia. The record was analyzed using advanced spectral methods and shows highly significant oscillatory components with periods of roughly 600, 350, 200, 125 and 11 years. Over the last millennium, our data show several features related to known climatic periods, such as the Medieval Optimum, the Little Ice Age and a recent steep variation since the beginning of the Industrial Era. During the preceding millennium, the &delta;¹⁸O series also reveals a surprising maximum at about 0 AD, suggesting low temperatures at that time. 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