RESUMEN
The transition from a humid green Sahara to today's hyperarid conditions in northern Africa ~5.5 thousand years ago shows the dramatic environmental change to which human societies were exposed and had to adapt to. In this work, we show that in the 620,000-year environmental record from the Chew Bahir basin in the southern Ethiopian Rift, with its decadal resolution, this one thousand year long transition is particularly well documented, along with 20-80 year long droughts, recurring every ~160 years, as possible early warnings. Together with events of extreme wetness at the end of the transition, these droughts form a pronounced climate "flickering", which can be simulated in climate models and is also present in earlier climate transitions in the Chew Bahir environmental record, indicating that transitions with flickering are characteristic of this region.
RESUMEN
This dataset provides detailed chronostratigraphic and lithological maps of the entire Ahr River catchment, which is located in Western Germany. The geological information was acquired using a transfer of the German chronostratigraphic terms into the international stratigraphic notation. Information about the geology and lithology was provided by publicly sourced data released by the German federal states North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate. The dataset includes information about the international stratigraphy, the corresponding German unit, and the lithology in English and German. The dataset is essentially useful for catchment-scale research, for example with regard to the causes and consequences of the July 2021 flooding of the Ahr River.