PANGAEA dataset associated with "Temperature change in subtropical southeastern Africa during the past 790,000 years"

Abstract

Across the glacial-interglacial cycles of the late Pleistocene (~700 kyr), temperature variability at low latitudes is often considered to have been negligible compared to changes in precipitation. However, a paucity of quantified temperature records makes this difficult to reliably assess. In this study, we used the Bayesian method CREST (Climate REconstruction SofTware) to produce a 790,000-year quantified temperature reconstruction from a marine pollen record from southeast Africa. The results reveal a strong similarity between temperature variability in subtropical Africa and global ice volume and CO2 concentrations, indicating that temperature in the region is not controlled by local insolation, but follows global trends at these timescales – ~4°C between glacial minima and interglacial maxima. The data also enable an assessment of the impact of temperature change on pollen diversity, with results showing there is no link between glacial-age temperatures/CO2 and a loss of diversity in this record.