David Fastovich

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of Geography

Here we seek to establish the spatial fingerprints of precipitation and temperature changes in eastern North America during the Younger Dryas and explore the role of meltwater forcing in producing this pattern. Our analyses integrate a network of 42 fossil pollen records and 27 other hydroclimate proxy records, three AOGCM experiments with an impos...

Plain Language Summary The Younger Dryas, circa 12,900 to 11,700 years ago, is a hemispheric abrupt climate change event that occurred at rates similar to those projected by the 21st century. Its cause has been linked to a reduction in northward oceanic heat transport in the Atlantic that led to Northern Hemispheric cooling and Southern Hemispheric...

In the southern Great Lakes Region, North America, between 19,000 and 8,000 years ago, temperatures rose by 2.5–6.5°C and spruce Picea forests/woodlands were replaced by mixed‐deciduous or pine Pinus forests. The demise of Picea forests/woodlands during the last deglaciation offers a model system for studying how changing climate and disturbance re...

Understanding the drivers of vegetation dynamics and no-analog communities in eastern North America is hampered by a scarcity of independent temperature indicators. We present a new branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether (brGDGT) temperature record from Bonnet Lake, Ohio (18–8 ka) and report uncertainty estimates based on Bayesian linear reg...