TY  - JOUR
A1  - Rach, Oliver
A1  - Kahmen, Ansgar
A1  - Brauer, Achim
A1  - Sachse, Dirk
T1  - A dual-biomarker approach for quantification of changes in relative humidity from sedimentary lipid D/H ratios
T2  - Climate of the past : an interactive open access journal of the European Geosciences Union
N2  - Past climatic change can be reconstructed from sedimentary archives by a number of proxies. However, few methods exist to directly estimate hydrological changes and even fewer result in quantitative data, impeding our understanding of the timing, magnitude and mechanisms of hydrological changes. Here we present a novel approach based on delta H-2 values of sedimentary lipid biomarkers in combination with plant physiological modeling to extract quantitative information on past changes in relative humidity. Our initial application to an annually laminated lacustrine sediment sequence from western Europe deposited during the Younger Dryas cold period revealed relative humidity changes of up to 15% over sub-centennial timescales, leading to major ecosystem changes, in agreement with palynological data from the region. We show that by combining organic geochemical methods and mechanistic plant physiological models on well characterized lacustrine archives it is possible to extract quantitative ecohydrological parameters from sedimentary lipid biomarker delta H-2 data.
Y1  - 2017
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/46542
SN  - 1814-9324
SN  - 1814-9332
VL  - 13
SP  - 741
EP  - 757
PB  - Copernicus
CY  - Göttingen
ER  -