This paper presents 24 new sea-level index points in the Spermonde Archipelago, Indonesia, and the reconstruction of the local Holocene relative sea-level history in combination with glacial isostasic adjustment models. We further show the importance of surveying the height of living coral microatolls as modern analogs to the fossil ones. Other interesting aspects are the potential subsidence of one of the densely populated islands, and we present eight samples that are dated to the Common Era.

A new study on droughts in Germany since 1500 reveals the long-term trend of single extreme events, as well as drier periods. Extreme droughts appeared in 1540, 1590, 1615, 1706, 1834, 1893, 1921, 1949 and 2018. Like today, droughts had manifold impacts such as harvest failures, water deficits, low water levels and forest fires. This had different societal consequences ranging from famine, disease, rising prices, migration and riots leading to subsidies and discussions on climate change.

Despite intense focus on the ~ 190 ‰ drop in Δ¹⁴C across the deglacial mystery interval, the specific mechanisms responsible for the apparent Δ¹⁴C excess in the glacial atmosphere have received considerably less attention. Sensitivity experiments with the computationally efficient Bern3D Earth system model suggest that our inability to reproduce the elevated Δ¹⁴C levels during the last glacial may reflect an underestimation of ¹⁴C production and/or a biased-high reconstruction of Δ¹⁴C.