EGU Talk Hausmann et al. 2022

press S to see presenter notes

Shell remains are a fantastic climate archive, that contains sub-annually resolved information on past temperatures. Because they preserve well in archaeological sites, they can be used as a local record of the short-term weather changes before the archaeological layers and the finds within were accumulated.

When we analyse shell records, we use oxygen isotope analysis of the growth rings within the shell. This climate data is important to show annual temperature minima and maxima, which means that ideally with our samples we show the highest and lowest values.

This is only possible, when a high sampling resolution is applied. The example on the right by Burchell and coauthors shows how the same shell record can look completely different if different sampling resolutions are applied and how very high or low temperature values are averaged out or skipped because of it.