Descifrando el clima de los últimos 2,58 ma. ¿Cómo, dónde y por qué? Registros continentales y marinos

The study of past climates, particularly those occurring during the Quaternary, is a fundamental tool to understand both current geoenvironmental processes and their past evolution without anthropogenic activities. It is based on the information stored in different paleorecords, both terrestrial (lacustrine sediments, stalagmites, peatbogs, tree-rings) and marine (marine sediments, corals). In this section we review, firstly the main characteristics of paleoclimate records, including their continuity, resolution or sensitivity to climate changes, and secondly, we describe the methodology usually applied to extract paleoclimate information, from fieldwork to dating techniques. Finally, we describe three examples of paleoclimate reconstructions from Iberian records carried out at different temporal scales. First of all, the last 500,000 years reconstructed from Western Mediterranean marine records; in the second place, the last glacial cycle climate changes inferred from caves in the Cantabrian coast and, thirdly, the hydrological variations of the last 2 millennia that can be found in lacustrine records. Some ideas about future developments in this line of research are outlined at the end of this section