Clim. Past, 10, 1581–1601, 2014 www.clim-past.net/10/1581/2014/ doi:10.5194/cp-10-1581-2014 © Author(s) 2014. CC Attribution 3.0 License. Expressions of climate perturbations in western Ugandan crater lake sediment records during the last 1000 years K. Mills1,2,*, D. B. Ryves1, N. J. Anderson1, C. L. Bryant3, and J. J. Tyler4 1Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leics LE11 3TU, UK 2School of Science and Engineering, University of Ballarat, Ballarat, Vic 3350, Australia 3NERC Radiocarbon Facility, Scottish Enterprise Technology Park, East Kilbride, Scotland G75 0QF, UK 4School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia *current address: British Geological Survey, Keyworth, Nottingham NG12 5GG, UK Correspondence to: K. Mills (
[email protected]) Received: 15 August 2013 – Published in Clim. Past Discuss.: 10 September 2013 Revised: 26 June 2014 – Accepted: 3 July 2014 – Published: 27 August 2014 Abstract. Equatorial East Africa has a complex regional the main phase of the Little Ice Age (LIA) (ca. AD 1600– patchwork of climate regimes, sensitive to climate fluctua- 1800), whereas the diatom response from the shallower Lake tions over a variety of temporal and spatial scales during Kyasanduka is more complex (with groundwater likely play- the late Holocene. Understanding how these changes are ing a key role), and may be driven more by changes in silica recorded in and interpreted from biological and geochemi- and other nutrients, rather than by lake level. The sensitivity cal proxies in lake sedimentary records remains a key chal- of these two Ugandan lakes to regional climate drivers breaks lenge to answering fundamental questions regarding the na- down in ca.