Solar forced Dansgaard/Oeschger events?

Abstract

It has been suggested that the strong climatic changes during the last ice age, the so‐called Dansgaard/Oeschger (D/O) events, could have been prompted by solar activity changes. This hypothesis is based on the apparent cyclic occurrence of the D/O events and the solar influence on climate during the Holocene on similar time scales. We test this hypothesis by comparing the 10 Be and δ 18 O records from the GRIP ice core. A superimposed epoch analysis allows us to reduce the noise in the data and to extract estimates of solar activity changes in connection to the D/O events. This comparison does not provide convincing evidence for a persistent solar influence on these strong climatic oscillations during the last ice age.