Short communicationEarly last glacial intra-interstadial climate variability recorded in a Sardinian speleothem

- The first well-dated palaeoclimate archive from the Island of Sardinia is presented.
- The occurrence of sub-interstadial events is extended to the Sardinian latitudes.
- Within age errors, GICC05 chronology of NGRIP ice core is more consistent than AICC2012 for comparison with S-Europe archives.

Chemical and physical proxy data from a precisely dated early last glacial (∼113-110 ka, MIS5d) Sardinian stalagmite reveal a sub-millennial-scale, cool-dry climate event centered at 112.0 +0.52/-0.59 ka, followed by a rapid return to warm-wet conditions at 111.76 +0.43/-0.45 ka. Comparison with regional speleothem records and the palaeotemperature proxy record from the NGRIP ice core (Greenland) suggests that this event corresponds to Greenland Interstadial (GI) 25b and 25a, an intra-interstadial climate oscillation within GI-25, according to the recent Greenland stratigraphic framework. The speleothem age is in reasonable agreement (within 0.8 kyr) with that of the corresponding event in Greenland based on the GICC05modelext ice chronology but is older by about 3.7 kyr than the Greenland age based on the AICC2012 chronology.