SOLAR AND VOLCANIC INFLUENCE ON CLIMATE OVER THE PAST 2000 YEARS AS SEEN IN EUROPEAN CAVE ICE CORES

In this paper, we present a 2000 years long, high-resolution proxy-based reconstruction of air temperature for Central Europe. Oxygen and hydrogen stable isotopes measured along a 10 m long ice core extracted from Scarisoara Ice Cave (Romania), were used to reconstruct past air temperature changes, and ¹⁴C measurements on organic remains found between the ice layers enabled us to construct a depth-age model for the ice core. The stable isotope data spanning the past 2000 years clearly shows four climatic events over this interval, attributed to the Roman Warm period (RWP), the Dark Ages Cold Period (DACP), Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA). Our data suggests that air temperature was highly variable during the LIA and more stable during the warm MWP and RWP. Long-term trends in air temperature are well correlated to the solar activity, while short-term fluctuations clearly follow the timing of major inter-tropical volcanic eruptions (i.e., 536, 1258/1259, 1586, 1641 and 1816).