Mid-Holocene climate and environmental changes revealed by subfossil wood from eastern England

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• Tatiana Bebchuk, University of Cambridge
• Wednesday 21 May 2025, 17:30-19:00
• Latimer Room, Clare College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact sr632.

To better understand current climate trends and extremes and their potential environmental impacts, annually resolved and absolutely dated proxy archives are required, but their quality and quantity decrease drastically back in time with only a few such records available before the Common Era. In this talk, we will learn from living and relict trees about climate and environmental conditions in eastern England and beyond from the present back to the mid-Holocene. I will introduce a vast, yet rapidly disappearing archive of thousands of exceptionally well-preserved subfossil oak and yew trunks in eastern England. Using dendrochronological, radiocarbon and isotopic dating, we anchor oak and yew tree-ring chronologies between 5,200 and 4,200 years ago. We further develop an eco-physiological model based on yew tree-ring stable carbon and oxygen isotopes to reconstruct mid-Holocene hydroclimate variability. We show that contrary to today’s climate-growth relationships, relatively dry soil and atmospheric conditions in the mid-Holocene favoured yew growth, while higher groundwater tables and wetter soils reduced ring width formation. We propose that yew woodlands disappeared around 4,200 years ago due to the combined effects of rapid sea-level rise in the North Sea, a prolonged negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation, and significant riverine flooding. These hydroclimatic and biogeographic changes in eastern England, together with independent evidence from pollen records and lake sediments, shed new lights on the yet debated 4.2 ka climate anomaly, typically associated with extreme drought in central Asia. Intriguingly, our new subfossil Fenland record implies unusually humid and stormy conditions for the North Atlantic/European region during this period.

This talk is part of the Quaternary Discussion Group (QDG) series.

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