Climate stage· The columns of time
MIS 7
243 ka → 191 ka
Warm by convention, complicated in detail: not one interglacial but a set of mild intervals separated by cold ones, a useful reminder of how much these bands smooth over.
What the evidence shows
MIS 7 appears here as a single band, but the underlying curve shows several distinct peaks and the cold troughs between them; specialists number these substages 7a to 7e. The frieze draws the stage and not its parts, because at this width each part would be a few pixels wide. That is a legitimate simplification and also a real loss: for anyone living through them, these fifty millennia were not one long warm spell.
Bounds and conventions
The band hides its own structure. Where a stage is drawn as one colour, the reader should assume oscillation underneath: the LR04 curve is continuous, and every boundary placed on it is a decision about where a gradient becomes a threshold.
An interglacial, broken by cool episodes (7b, 7d).