Marine sediment cores database for the Mediterranean Basin: a tool for past climatic and enivirinemental studies

Abstract

Paleoclimatic dataare essential forfingerprinting the climate of the earth before the advent of modern recording instruments. They enable us to recognize pastclimaticeventsandpredictfuturetrends.Withinthis framework, a conceptual and logical model was drawn tophysicallyimplementapaleoclimaticdatabasenamed WDB-Paleo that includes the paleoclimatic proxies data of marine sediment cores of the Mediterranean Basin. Twenty entities were defined to record four main categories of data: a) the features of oceanographic cruises and cores (metadata); b) the presence/absence of paleoclimatic proxies pulled from about 200 scientific papers; c) the quantitative analysis of planktonic and benthonic foraminifera, pollen, calcareous nannoplankton, magneticsusceptibility,stableisotopes,radionuclidesvalues of about 14 cores recovered by Institute for Coastal Marine Environment (IAMC) of Italian National Research Council (CNR) in the framework of several past research projects; d) specific entities recording quantitative data on δ18O, AMS 14C (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) and tephralayersavailableinscientificpapers.Publisheddata concerning paleoclimatic proxies in the Mediterranean Basinarerecordedonlyfor400outof6000coresretrieved intheareaandtheyshowaveryirregulargeographicaldistribution.Moreover,thedataavailabilitydecreaseswhen a constrainedtimeintervalisinvestigatedormorethanone proxyisrequired.WepresentthreeapplicationsofWDBPaleo for the Younger Dryas (YD) paleoclimatic event at Mediterraneanscaleandpointoutthepotentialityofthis toolforintegratedstratigraphystudies.