Description: The hydrogen isotope composition of plant leaf wax (dDwax) has been found to record the isotope composition of precipitation (dDp). Hence, dDwax is increasingly used for palaeohydrological reconstruction. It is, however, also affected by secondary factors, such as vegetation type, evapotranspiration and environmental conditions, complicating its direct application as a quantitative palaeohydrological proxy. Here, we present dDwax data from soils along vegetation gradients and climatic transects in southern Africa to investigate the impact of different environmental factors on dDwax. We found that dDwax correlated significantly with annual dDp (obtained from the interpolated Online Isotopes in Precipitation Calculator data set) throughout eastern and central South Africa, where the majority of the mean annual precipitation falls during the summer. We found evidence for the effect of evapotranspiration on dDwax, while vegetation change was of minor importance. In contrast, we found that δDwax did not correlate with annual dDp in western and southwestern South Africa, where most of the annual precipitation falls during winter. Wide microclimatic variability in this topographically variable region, including distinct vegetation communities and high vegetation diversity between biomes as well as a potential influence of summer rain in some locals, likely compromised identification of a clear relationship between dDwax and dDp in this region. Our findings have implications for palaeoenvironmental investigations using dDwax in southern Africa. In the summer rain dominated eastern and central region, dDwax should serve well as a qualitative palaeohydrological recorder. In contrast, the processes influencing dDwax in the winter rain- dominated western and southwestern South Africa remain unclear and, pending further analyses, potentially constrain its use as palaeohydrological proxy in this region.

Description: This dataset contains the best estimates for Mean Annual Temperature Reconstructions from marine core MD96-2048. Under Other version, the xlsx file contains the 1) best estimates for Mean Annual Temperature Reconstructions, 2) posterior distribution of probabilities for each sample, 3) conversion table of plant species to pollen taxa, 4) percentage data used in the reconstruction, 5) list of selected and excluded pollen taxa.

Description: Southwestern Africa's coastal marine mudbelt, a prominent Holocene sediment package, provides a valuable archive for reconstructing terrestrial palaeoclimates on the adjacent continent. While the origin of terrestrial inorganic material has been intensively studied, the sources of terrigenous organic material deposited in the mudbelt are yet unclear. In this study, plant wax derived n-alkanes and their compound-specific d13C in soils, flood deposits and suspension loads from regional fluvial systems and marine sediments are analysed to characterize the origin of terrestrial organic material in the southwest African mudbelt. Soils from different biomes in the catchments of the Orange River and small west coast rivers show on average distinct n-alkane distributions and compound-specific d13C values reflecting biome-specific vegetation types, most notably the winter rainfall associated Fynbos Biome of the southwestern Cape. In the fluvial sediment samples from the Orange River, changes in the n-alkane distributions and compound-specific d13C compositions reveal an overprint by local vegetation along the river's course. The smaller west coast rivers show distinct signals, reflecting their small catchment areas and particular vegetation communities. Marine surface sediments spanning a transect from the northern mudbelt (29°S) to St. Helena Bay (33°S) reveal subtle, but spatially coherent, changes in n-alkane distributions and compound-specific d13C, indicating the influence of Orange River sediments in the northern mudbelt, the increasing importance of terrigenous input from the adjacent western coastal biomes in the central mudbelt, and contributions from the Fynbos Biome to the southern mudbelt. These findings indicate the different sources of terrestrial organic material deposited in the mudbelt, and highlight the potential the mudbelt has to preserve evidence of environmental change from the adjacent continent.

Description: Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

Description: Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records are from trees, ice, sediment, corals, speleothems, documentary evidence, and other archives. They range in length from 50 to 2000 years, with a median of 547 years, while temporal resolution ranges from biweekly to centennial. Nearly half of the proxy time series are significantly correlated with HadCRUT4.2 surface temperature over the period 1850–2014. Global temperature composites show a remarkable degree of coherence between high- and low-resolution archives, with broadly similar patterns across archive types, terrestrial versus marine locations, and screening criteria. The database is suited to investigations of global and regional temperature variability over the Common Era, and is shared in the Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format, including serializations in Matlab, R and Python.

Description: Our ability to identify the timing and extent of past major climate fluctuations is central to understanding changes in the global climate system. Of the events that have occurred in recent geological time, the Younger Dryas (YD, 13-11.5 ka), an abrupt return to near-glacial conditions during the last glacial-interglacial transition (ca. 18-11.5 ka), is one of the most widely reported. While this event is apparent throughout the Northern Hemisphere (Peteet, 1995), evidence for its occurrence in the Southern Hemisphere remains equivocal due to a lack of well-dated terrestrial records. Here we report high-resolution stable carbon and nitrogen isotope records obtained from a rock hyrax midden, revealing the first unequivocal terrestrial manifestation of the YD from the southern African subtropics. These results provide key evidence for the relative influence of the YD, and suggest that a subtropical-temperate transition zone existed along the oceanic Subtropical Front ([~]41{degrees}S) across the Southern Hemisphere, with the Northern Hemisphere exerting a strong influence on all but the higher latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere after the Heinrich Stadial 1 (15 ka).