High-resolution climatic impacts on shallow-water marine ecosystems during the Holocene

Climate change has been described as 'one of the most pressing matters to mankind' by Sir David King, the Chief Scientific advisor to the government and its impacts are to be seen both in terrestrial and marine environments. Oceanic water circulation controls regional climate change in North West Europe and also affects marine ecosystems, fisheries and climatic susceptibility to man-made emissions. If attempts to model the impacts of future climate change on marine ecosystems and associated fisheries are to succeede, we require a highly detailed description of how past climatic changes have affected those ecosystems. This can be achieved by examining how climatic variability has impacted marine ecosystems during the last ~10000 years, the Holocene. However, no such highly-detailed data exist for North West Europe. This study will investigate fossil assemblages preserved in chronologically ordered, shallow-water, marine carbonate deposits spanning most of the Holocene. The stratified carbonate deposits targetted are formed by algae and host very diverse communities of associated organisms while alive, making them ideal recorders of past assemblage structure, yet remain un-utilised in that capacity to date. Any changes in those associated assemblages with time, will be related to historical changes in marine climate obtained from a novel organic recorder developed for this investigation, the algal deposit itself. Data obtained by this investigation have important applications in determining how predicted future climate change is likely to impact marine ecosystems and humans who are the end users of comercially targeted ecosystems. Additionlly, organic recorders of past temperatures are urgently needed for the North Atlantic to help refine European climate predictions for the next 100 years. Thus the highly detailed data yielded from the novel recorder developed for this study has wider significance in obtaining sub-annual historical temperature data for North Atlantic oceanic circulation, which may feed into a global push to better understand the dynamics of heat transfer in northern seas affecting regional climates during the Holocene.