The late quaternary paleoenvironment of Chile as seen from marine archives

Abstract. Many variables have been used to reconstruct Chilean paleoenvironmental changes during the late Quaternary. In this paper we present an overview of a number of these variables, so-called proxies, that have been inferred from marine sediments from the Chilean continental margin and summarise the results. In general, a glacial-interglacial pattern of climate changes can be recognised in the proxy records with high-frequency variabilities superposed. The synthesis shows that the records in the Southeast Pacific are clearly dominated by a high-latitude climate forcing mechanism and that there is a noticeable gradual increase of tropical forcing moving from south to north along the South American continental margin.