Hydro-climatic variability in the southwestern Indian Ocean between 6000 and 3000 years ago
2018
Abstract. The “4.2 ka event” is frequently described as a major global
climate anomaly between 4.2 and 3.9 ka, which defines the beginning of
the current Meghalayan age in the Holocene epoch. The “event” has been
disproportionately reported from proxy records from the Northern Hemisphere, but
its climatic manifestation remains much less clear in the Southern Hemisphere.
Here, we present highly resolved and chronologically well-constrained
speleothem oxygen and carbon isotopes records between ∼6 and 3 ka
from Rodrigues Island in the southwestern subtropical Indian Ocean, located
∼600 km east of Mauritius. Our records show that the 4.2 ka event did not manifest itself as a period of major climate change at Rodrigues Island in
the context of our record's length. Instead, we find evidence for a
multi-centennial drought that occurred near-continuously between 3.9 and
3.5 ka and temporally coincided with climate change throughout the
Southern Hemisphere.
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