Negri, A.

First of all we thank Hilgen and co-authors for their interest in our manuscript. Here we provide an answer to their comment in order to prove the robustness of our conclusions, despite the tuning process that we performed on the original MEDSTACK from Lourens et al. (2004) and Wang et al. (2010).

The high–low latitude climate interplay during the Plio–Pleistocene global cooling is not yet well understood. Insight on the Mediterranean region can provide some clues about past significant climate changes since the basin reflects the climate dynamics of both high-latitude and low-latitude regions, being connected to the North Atlantic and subjected to monsoon influence. Here we shade light on this connection problem by per- forming a spectral analysis on an Eastern Mediterranean stack of planktonic records spanning the last 5 Ma and by further comparing it to North Atlantic and Pacific deep- and surface-water records. Our main conclu- sion is that the Mediterranean detected the main global climate transitions over the last 5 Myr although sapropel depositions indicate that it remained influenced by the African summer monsoon during the whole interval. Our analysis reveals that until 2.2 Ma the Mediterranean planktonic record is driven by re- gional processes dominated by precession. The progressive emergence of the 41-kyr frequency in the Medi- terranean records around 2.8 Ma suggests that, since this date, the Mediterranean was more and more affected by the high-latitude climate dynamics forcing than by the low-latitude one. Moreover, during the ongoing Plio–Pleistocene cooling, the 41-kyr frequency signal in the Mediterranean records anticipated high-latitude deep-water response to the intensification of the Northern Hemisphere Glaciations (NHG) and lagged the signal in tropical latitudes. Finally, toward 1.2 Ma the results suggest that the progressive shift from the 41-kyr to the 100-kyr frequency was led by the northern high latitudes. Overall, our results confirm that the Mediterranean is an ideal site to study the interplay between high and low latitude climates.

Sapropels are sediments rich in organic carbon occurring cyclically in the Mediterranean marine records and whose origin has been matter of great debate during the last decades. While the first sapropels were found in eastern Mediterranean sediments from the Miocene period, in this paper we focus on the layers that were subsequently found in sediment cores of Pliocene to Quaternary age from the eastern Mediterranean mostly. Since the very beginning of the history of studies on sapropels, authors inferred that those lev- els, being interbedded as dark layers in more or less normal light “open marine” sediments, formed during short-lived but catastrophic alterations in Mediterranean oceanographic conditions, probably linked to broader climate changes. In this paper, the main hypotheses regarding the origin of those sediments are described and we highlight the importance of sapropel records for the study of climatic and oceanographic variability in the Mediterranean area in the context of global climate change.