ABSTRACT
During the transition from the last glacial maximum (LGM, c. 22,000 years ago) to the Holocene (since c. 11,600 years ago), ice-core records from Antarctica and Greenland indicate that rapid warming events happened first in the Southern Hemisphere (Blunier et al., 1997; White and Steig, 1998; Shi et al., 2000). These asynchronous temperature variations are recently confirmed by Stenni et al. (2011). Their chronology from Antarctica, based on methane synchronization, supports the hypothesis that the cooling of the Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR, c. 14,700-12,700 ka BP) is synchronous with the Bølling-Allerød warming in the Northern Hemisphere 14,700 years ago. Conversely, the onset of the Younger Dryas (YD, c. 12,800-11,700 ka BP) cooling of the Northern Hemisphere is synchronous with the end of the ACR. Although it is clear since the 1990s that the cooling phases of the late-glacial/Holocene transition did not occur synchronously in both hemispheres, rapid late-glacial cooling oscillations were assigned to the Younger Dryas Phase and were used to confirm the synchrony of late-glacial cooling events in both hemispheres (Peteet, 1995). Thompson et al.
