Unraveling environmental histories from skeletal diaries — Advances in sclerochronology

High-resolution proxy archives from aquatic settings are essential to better understand processes and mechanisms of global change. During the last decade, it has become increasingly evident that calcified tissues of bivalve mollusks and cold-water corals, in particular, can significantly increase our knowledge of seasonal to multi-decadal paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental variability in the extratropical oceans and coastal marine settings. Daily, tidal, fortnightly and annual growth patterns of periodically formed skeletal hard parts provide a means to place the proxy record in a precise temporal context. Their extreme longevity coupled with the running similarity between growth increment time-series of contemporaneous bivalves opens the possibility of constructing stacked chronologies covering centuries to millennia which provide information on decadal climate and environmental variability and magnitudes of climate variability through time. A current major research focus is on how to translate geochemical properties of the skeletons into quantifiable environmental proxy data and how to eliminate the adverse influence of vital effects on the proxy records.This special issue presents the most recent advances in the field of sclerochronology, specifically calcified tissues of bivalve mollusks, cold-water corals and tropical shallow water corals. The majority of the contributions deal with the potential reconstruction of temperature, pH and productivity through the analysis of variable growth rates, Sr/Ca, Mg/Ca, Ba/Ca, U/Ca, Li/Ca, δ13C, δ18O and δ44/40Ca. Four papers present composite chronologies of two long-lived bivalve species and discuss inherent decadal climate variability, and one study demonstrates that sclerochronology can shed light on socioeconomic patterns of past human populations as well as resource use and resource management by people.

► Selected papers outgrowing from 2nd Intl. Sclerochronology Conference 2010
► Covered archives: bivalves, cold-water and tropical shallow-water corals
► Proxies: growth rate, Sr/Ca, Mg/Ca, Ba/Ca, U/Ca, Li/Ca, δ13C, δ18O, δ44/40Ca
► Focus on proxy evaluation, chronology construction and links to archaeology