Reflooding formerly drained peatlands has been proposed as a means to reduce losses of organic matter and sequester soil carbon for climate change mitigation, but a renewal of high methane emissions has been reported for these ecosystems, offsetting mitigation potential. Our ability to interpret observed methane fluxes in reflooded peatlands and make predictions about future flux trends is limited due to a lack of detailed stu...

The Svalbard–Barents ice sheet was predominantly a marine‐based ice sheet and reconstructing the timing and rate of its decay during the last deglaciation informs predictions of future decay of marine‐based ice sheets (e.g. West Antarctica). Records of ice‐sheet change are routinely built with cosmogenic surface exposure ages, but in some regions, this method is complicated by the presence of isotopic inheritance yielding arti...

Ecology Letters (2012) Abstract Caribbean reef corals have declined precipitously since the 1980s due to regional episodes of bleaching, disease and algal overgrowth, but the extent of earlier degradation due to localised historical disturbances such as land clearing and overfishing remains unresolved. We analysed coral and molluscan fossil assemblages from reefs near Bocas del Toro, Panama to construct a timeline of ecologica...

The transition from arid glacial to moist early Holocene conditions represented a profound change in northern lowland Neotropical climate. Here we report a detailed record of changes in moisture availability during the latter part of this transition (∼11 250 to 7500 cal. yr BP) inferred from sediment cores retrieved in Lake Petén Itzá, northern Guatemala. Pollen assemblages demonstrate that a mesic forest had been largely esta...