La ricerca di nuovi archivi naturali ad alta risoluzione per comprendere le variazioni climatiche nel Mediterraneo nel corso degli ultimi 500 anni.

Paleoclimate records are important tools for understanding climate modifications and describing recent anthropogenic perturbations in climate change relative to natural variability in the Earth climate system. Moreover, time-series proxy records of the main physical and chemical parameters in the marine and continental environments are increasingly used for testing climate models in order to ascertain the reliability of projections of future scenarios in our greenhouse modified Earth. In order to make up for the limited number of continuous instrumental measurements back in time of climatic variables such as sea surface temperature (SST), and sea-level fluctuations, a complementary approach is the examination of geochemical tracers (i.e. trace elements and stable isotopes) in well-dated natural marine archives. Recently, the Mediterranean Sea has been the focus of a number of studies where new high resolution climate archives have been investigated utilizing proxies for sea surface temperature, different to those available for tropical regions. In particular, vermetids (Dendropoma petraeum) and non-tropical zooxanthellate corals (Cladocora caespitosa) have been studied by conventional and advanced analytical techniques (e.g., laser ablation ICP-MS, MC-ICP-MS) and have been successfully used as high-resolution palaeo-environmental proxies. Vermetid reefs have the potential to yield valuable information on the past sea-level changes and SST during the last 500 years, through the combination of stable isotopes and radiocarbon dating. The trace element concentration of the skeletal aragonite of the Mediterranean zooxanthellate coral Cladocora caespitosa has been successfully demonstrated to be a valid high-resolution SST archive for the last 150 years. Here we present a review of the main results we have obtained during the last six years in the study of natural marine archives collected in various sites along the Mediterranean Sea, reporting our methodological approach and the most important achievements.