Sub-millennial climate variability from high resolution water isotopes in the EDC ice core

. The EPICA Dome C (EDC) ice core provides the longest continuous climatic record covering the last 800 000 years (800 kyrs). Obtaining homogeneous high resolution measurements and accounting for diffusion provide a unique opportunity 15 to study decadal to millennial variability within the past glacial and interglacial periods. We present here a compilation of high resolution (11 cm) water isotopic records with 27,000 δ 18 O measurements and 7,920 δ D measurements (covering respectively 94 % and 27 % of the whole EDC record), including both published and new measurements (2,900 for both δ 18 O and δ D) over the last 800 kyrs on the EDC ice core. We show that overlapping time series performed over multiple depth ranges over the past 20 years, using different analytical methods and in different laboratories, are consistent within analytical uncertainty, and 20 therefore can be combined to provide a homogeneous data set. A frequency decomposition of the most complete δ 18 O record and a simple assessment of the possible influence of diffusion on the measured profile shows that the variability during glacial periods at multi-decadal to multi-centennial timescale is higher than variability of the interglacial periods. This analysis shows as well that during interglacial periods characterized by a temperature optimum at its beginning, the multi-centennial variability is the strongest over this temperature optimum.

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