Reversed Holocene temperature-moisture relationship in the Horn of Africa.

Anthropogenic climate change is predicted to severely impact the global hydrological cycle, particularly in tropical regions where agriculture-based economies depend on monsoon rainfall. In the Horn of Africa, more frequent drought conditions in recent decades contrast with climate models projecting precipitation to increase with rising temperature. Here we use organic geochemical climate-proxy data from the sediment record of Lake Chala (Kenya and Tanzania) to probe the stability of the link between hydroclimate and temperature over approximately the past 75,000 years, hence encompassing a sufficiently wide range of temperatures to test the 'dry gets drier, wet gets wetter' paradigm of anthropogenic climate change in the time domain.

Crude oil exposure of early life stages of Atlantic haddock suggests threshold levels for developmental toxicity as low as 0.1 μg total polyaromatic hydrocarbon (TPAH)/L.

Atlantic haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) embryos bind dispersed crude oil droplets to the eggshell and are consequently highly susceptible to toxicity from spilled oil. We established thresholds for developmental toxicity and identified any potential long-term or latent adverse effects that could impair the growth and survival of individuals. Embryos were exposed to oil for eight days (10, 80 and 300 μg oil/L, equivalent to 0.

A predominantly tropical influence on late Holocene hydroclimate variation in the hyperarid central Sahara.

The climate history of the Sahara desert during recent millennia is obscured by the near absence of natural climate archives, hampering insight in the relative importance of southerly (tropical) and northerly (midlatitude) weather systems at submillennial time scales. A new lake sediment record from Ounianga Serir oasis in northern Chad, spanning the Late Holocene without interruption, confirms that immediately before ca 4200 years ago, the Sahara experienced an episode of hyperaridity even more extreme than today's desert climate. The hypersaline terminal lake which formed afterwards never desiccated during the late Holocene due to continuous inflow of fossil groundwater, yet its water balance was sensitive to temporal variation in local rainfall and lake surface evaporation.