Regional Description: Australia, Pacific Island Region (Oceania), Hawaii

The terrestrial Quaternary palaeoclimate archives of Australia, the tropical Pacific archipelago and Hawaii bear witness to climate variability – also recorded in other tropical regions – with different temporal scales. Major glacial/interglacial cycles are impressively documented for the last ca. 300 ka BP in the glacial landforms and sediments of the Mauna Kea volcanic massif of Hawaii, the dune generations, beach ridges and lacustrine sediments of arid interior Australia. Speleothem data of the last ca. 500 ka BP complement the observations. Warm stages were warmer and wetter in tropical regions, cold stages cooler and more arid compared to the present climate. Quaternary lake levels and moraines provide evidence of a trend of decreasing humidity since MIS 11 from interglacial to interglacial and, as in Africa, extreme interglacial humidity in the older warm stages. The last glacial and Termination I showed numerous climate oscillations. MIS 4 is attested in the tropical Pacific region by glaciation in Hawaii as a much cooler phase. Glacier advances reached a greater extent than in the LGM (MIS 2). Thus, they show similar behaviour to glaciers in tropical SE and S Asia, E Africa, and S America. The LGM was relatively cold (c. 5 °C cooler than today: 3–7 °C lower temperatures in tropical Australia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea; up to 8 °C colder in the interior of SE Australia; c. 7 °C cooler in Hawaii) and dry (c. 30% less precipitation than today, due to a weaker summer monsoon and a northward shift of the ITCZ). The SSTs were about 5 °C colder and warmed rapidly after about 20 ka BP; they reached present-day levels by about 15 ka BP. South of Australia and in and around New Zealand, there is evidence for the ACR, while the YD is undetectable. Numerous paleoclimate archives show the major influence of global and solar forcing.