Temperature and Rainfall Variability in the Northern Andes Over the Past Two Millennia

Recent studies of tropical glaciers have shown that most are retreating rapidly, with some of the most dramatic changes occurring since the mid-1970s, most likely as a result of increasing global temperatures. However, a longer-term perspective is needed to place these changes in the context of natural climate variability. To better understand the climatological factors driving long-term variations in the mass balance of tropical glaciers, we reconstructed changes in precipitation and temperature in the northern tropical Andes using variations in the hydrogen isotope composition of sedimentary leaf waxes and branched GDGT distributions in a high-resolution varved sediment record from Lago Chingaza, Colombia. Br-GDGT derived temperatures are significantly correlated with instrumental temperature data and indicate that recent warming in the northern tropical Andes is unprecedented over the past two millennia. Furthermore, the magnitude of warming since the Little Ice Age is substantially larger than suggested by high latitude temperature reconstructions. Hydrogen isotope data indicated that colder conditions during the Little Ice Age were accompanied by a decrease in rainfall, likely associated with a southward shift in the position of the ITCZ. Over the past few centuries, warmer temperatures were accompanied by an increase in rainfall and a northward expansion of the tropical rainbelt. Together, these data suggest that the dominant control on the retreat of Andean glaciers has been the unprecedented rate and magnitude of recent warming.