The HERMES cold-water coral database

The HERMES cold-water coral database is a combination of historical and published sclerectinia cold-water coral occurrences (mainly Lophelia pertusa) and new records of the HERMES project along the European margin. This database will be updated if new findings are reported. New or historical data can be sent to Ben De Mol (mailto:bendemol@ub.edu). Besides geocodes a second category indicates the coral species and if they are sampled alive or dead. If absolute dating is available of the corals this is provide together with the method. Only the framework building cold-water corals are selected: Lophelia pertusa, Madrepora oculata and common cold-water corals often associated with the framework builders like: Desmophyllum sp and Dendrophylia sp. in comments other observed corals are indicated. Another field indicates if the corals are part of a large build-up or solitary. A third category of parameters is referencing to the quality of the represented data. In this category are the following parameters indicated: source of reference, source type (such as Fishermen location, scientific paper, cruise reports). sample code and or name and sample type (e.g. rock dredge, grab, video line). These parameters must allow an assessment of the quality of the described parameters.

Database of the GLAMAP project

A uniform chronology for foraminifera-based sea surface temperature records has been established in more than 120 sediment cores obtained from the equatorial and eastern Atlantic up to the Arctic Ocean. The chronostratigraphy of the last 30,000 years is mainly based on published d18O records and 14C ages from accelerator mass spectrometry, converted into calendar-year ages. The high-precision age control provides the database necessary for the uniform reconstruction of the climate interval of the Last Glacial Maximum within the GLAMAP-2000 project.

Expanded GHOST database

In this study we review a global set of alkenone- and foraminiferal Mg/Ca-derived sea surface temperatures (SST) records from the Holocene and compare them with a suite of published Eemian SST records based on the same approach. For the Holocene, the alkenone SST records belong to the actualized GHOST database (Kim, J.-H., Schneider R.R., 2004). The actualized GHOST database not only confirms the SST changes previously described but also documents the Holocene temperature evolution in new oceanic regions such as the Northwestern Atlantic, the eastern equatorial Pacific, and the Southern Ocean. A comparison of Holocene SST records stemming from the two commonly applied paleothermometry methods reveals contrasting - sometimes divergent - SST evolution, particularly at low latitudes where SST records are abundant enough to infer systematic discrepancies at a regional scale. Opposite SST trends at particular locations could be explained by out-of-phase trends in seasonal insolation during the Holocene. This hypothesis assumes that a strong contrast in the ecological responses of coccolithophores and planktonic foraminifera to winter and summer oceanographic conditions is the ultimate reason for seasonal differences in the origin of the temperature signal provided by these organisms. As a simple test for this hypothesis, Eemian SST records are considered because the Holocene and Eemian time periods experienced comparable changes in orbital configurations, but had a higher magnitude in insolation variance during the Eemian. For several regions, SST changes during both interglacials were of a similar sign, but with higher magnitudes during the Eemian as compared to the Holocene. This observation suggests that the ecological mechanism shaping SST trends during the Holocene was comparable during the penultimate interglacial period. Although this "ecology hypothesis" fails to explain all of the available results, we argue that any other mechanism would fail to satisfactorily explain the observed SST discrepancies among proxies.