Background
Kemp et al. write that "limited evidence for Holocene climatic variability has emerged in Australia (Chivas et al., 1986, 1993; De Deckker et al., 1991; Gell et al., 1994; Stanley and De Deckker, 2002; Turney et al., 2004; Donders et al., 2007; Gouramanis et al., 2010), and the Southern Ocean (Charles et al., 1996; Ninnemann et al., 1999; Gingele et al., 2007; Moros et al., 2009), and is recorded in Antarctic ice cores (Masson et al., 2000; Masson-Delmotte et al., 2004; Marino et al., 2008; Gabrielli et al., 2010) and glacial advances (Allen et al., 2010)." And they state that it is thus "expedient to explore the potential of other proxies for extracting detailed information from the sediment records of Australian lakes."

What was done
Working with piston cores of sediments extracted from the bottoms of two Wimmera lakes - Jacka Lake and NW Jacka Lake, centered on 36°48'S, 141°48'E in southeastern Australia - the UK and Australian scientists developed palaeosalinity histories for the groundwater-influenced water bodies "from an ostracod-based, weighted-averaging transfer function, supplemented with evidence from Campylodiscus clypeus (diatom), charophyte oogonia, Coxiella striata (gastropod), Elphidium sp. (foraminifera), Daphniopsis sp. ephippia (Cladocera), and brine shrimp (Paratemia zietziana) fecal pellets, the δ¹⁸O of ostracods, and >130 µm quartz sand counts," along with a chronology based on "optically stimulated luminescence and calibrated radiocarbon ages."

What was learned
Kemp et al. report discovering "short-lived, low-salinity events at 8800, 7200, 5900, 4800, 2400, 1300 and 400 years [that] are similar in timing and number to those recorded on Australia's southern continental shelf, and globally [italics added]." They also say these events "provide evidence for the existence of the ~1500-year cycle in mainland southern Australia," adding they surmise that the low-salinity excursions are "cool events associated with periodic equator-ward shifts in the westerly wind circulation." In addition, they say that a solar origin for the ~1500-year cycle "is favored by some workers (Bond et al., 2001; Mayewski et al., 2004; Versteegh, 2005; Dima and Lohmann, 2009; Helama et al., 2010)," and they report that considerable evidence "suggests that variations in solar output may have caused the position of the westerly flow to vary at centennial to millennial timescales in the late Holocene (Varma et al., 2010)," which interpretation, in their words, "is consistent with climatic excursions during the Holocene recorded in South America (Lamy et al., 2001; Moreno, 2004; Kaiser et al., 2005; Moreno et al., 2009) and in glacial surges in New Zealand's South Island (Gellatly et al., 1988; Suggate, 1990), both linked to varying westerly influence (Fitzharris et al., 1992; Hooker and Fitzharris, 1999), and which are in good agreement with the records obtained here."

What it means
Evidence continues to accumulate for the reality of both centennial- and millennial-scale cycles of climate change that ultimately have their origin in similarly-timed oscillations of some aspect of solar activity.

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