Strong regional climatic fluctuations in the tropics
Climatic fluctuations close to the equator show a different pattern to climate change in the Arctic and Antarctic. In the tropics distinct 11500 year fluctuations between wet and dry periods can be clearly identified which do not occur in temperature reconstructions of polar ice cores. The investigations of the climate of the last 25000 years in tropical Africa show that dry phases prevailed during lower solar radiation in March and September, which caused the following rain period to be less intensive. This emphasises the significance of hydrological variations in regional climate change, as was formulated by a European consortium of earth scientists under the direction of Professor Dirk Verschuren (University of Gent, Belgium) in the latest issue of the science magazine 'Nature' (Vol. 462, 7273)...