Descripción: This paper discusses the general atmospheric circulation over Patagonia on the basis of the principal palaeoclimate forcings: continental drift, orography, variations in the greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere, evolution of the atmosphere and the oceans, changes in the orbit of the Earth, albedo feedbacks, and the land surface. These processes affect climate on time scales of millions to hundreds of thousands of years. Additionally, orbital forcing has had a major influence on climate during the Quaternary. The palaeo-atmospheric circulation of Patagonia is analyzed for the Early to Late Jurassic, the Cretaceous, the Late Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the Tortonian-Oligocene cooling, the Pliocene, the Quaternary including the Last Glacial Maximum, the Holocene Optimum, and the last millennium changes. Alternative palaeo-atmospheric circulations from climatic modelling scenarios through the ages are reviewed and compared with proxy data. Detailed and updated reference information on the topics analyzed is also provided. © 2011 The Linnean Society of London.

Descripción: The Little Ice Age (LIA) is a climate episode between the 16th and middle 19th centuries, characterized in Europe by colder temperatures and occasionally stormy weather. In certain areas of Europe, long instrumental observations record the Little Ice Age partially; however, in the pampean region meteorological data only started about one hundred years ago. The objective of this contribution is to provide new evidences about the Little Ice Age in the Pampean plain based on lake cores. Short cores of Chascomús and Monte lakes were analyzed and, according to AMS data, they span the last 500 years. The Chascomús core consists of three fining upward sequences. Sediment logical and biological proxies demonstrate a benign period from the end of the 15th century. Around 1700 AD lake level decreased and a dry period started and lasted for almost 150 years. After 1850 AD higher lake levels and increased moisture dominate the pampean scenario. The del Monte lake core is also composed of three fining upwards sequences, and AMS chronology assigned a basal age between 1441-1494 AD. Although the model age needs improvement, the events of Chascomús and del Monte lakes seem to be correlated and show coherent regional tendencies of humidity and droughts during the last 500 years.

Descripción: A geological and geophysical study in fluvial post-pampean sediments cropping out on the right bank of the Rio Areco was carried out. The sequence studied comprises the Guerrero and Río Salado members of the Luján Formation, in which three palaeosols are developed. The geophysical studies suggest an impoverishment of the detrital ferrimagnetic minerals (magnetite and titanomagnetite) in the parent material, due to the action of pedogenic processes, accompanied by the generation of two neominerales, one antiferromagnetic and the other ferrimagnetic. The ferrimagnetic mineral consists of particles of ultrafine magnetite (state of superparamagnetic domain, grain size approaching 0.01 μm) formed during periods of excess water. The antiferromagnetic minerals (hematite and/or goethite) were generated in periods of major water deficiency. The presence of these minerals would be indicating a warm and humid climate with a marked dryperiod. The oldest paleosol was developed on the Guerrero Member which correlates with the Puesto Callejón Viejo palaeosol that has an age between 10,000 and 8,000 years AP, in this profile. The Rio Salado Member and the two paleosols developed on it would have developed during the warm period known as, Megathermal, between 9,000 and 7,000 years BP. © 2004 Asociación Geológica Argentina.

Descripción: Spectral analyses performed on records of cosmogenic nuclides reveal a group of dominant spectral components during the Holocene period. Only a few of them are related to known solar cycles, i.e., the De Vries/Suess, Gleissberg and Hallstatt cycles. The origin of the others remains uncertain. On the other hand, time series of North Atlantic atmospheric/sea surface temperatures during the last ice age display the existence of repeated large-scale warming events, called Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events, spaced around multiples of 1470 years. The De Vries/Suess and Gleissberg cycles with periods close to 1470/7 (∼210) and 1470/17 (∼86.5) years have been proposed to explain these observations. In this work we found that a conceptual bistable model forced with the De Vries/Suess and Gleissberg cycles plus noise displays a group of dominant frequencies similar to those obtained in the Fourier spectra from paleo-climate during the Holocene. Moreover, we show that simply changing the noise amplitude in the model we obtain similar power spectra to those corresponding to GISP2 δ18O (Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2) during the last ice age. These results give a general dynamical framework which allows us to interpret the main characteristic of paleoclimate records from the last 100 000 years. © 2010 Author(s).