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Globally accelerating trends in societal development and human environmental impacts since the mid-twentieth century 1–7 are known as the Great Acceleration and have been discussed as a key indicator of the onset of the Anthropocene epoch 6 . While reports on ecological responses (for example, changes in species range or local extinctions) to the Great Acceleration are multiplying 8, 9 , it is unknown whether such biotic responses are undergoing a similar acceleration over time. This knowledge gap stems from the limited availability of time series data on biodiversity changes across large temporal and geographical extents. Here we use a dataset of repeated plant surveys from 302 mountain summits across Europe, spanning 145 years of observation, to assess the temporal trajectory of mountain biodiversity changes as a globally coherent imprint of the Anthropocene. We find a continent-wide acceleration in the rate of increase in plant species richness, with five times as much species enrichment between 2007 and 2016 as fifty years ago, between 1957 and 1966. This acceleration is strikingly synchronized with accelerated global warming and is not linked to alternative global change drivers. The accelerating increases in species richness on mountain summits across this broad spatial extent demonstrate that acceleration in climate-induced biotic change is occurring even in remote places on Earth, with potentially far-ranging consequences not only for biodiversity, but also for ecosystem functioning and services.

THE various reservoirs of the global carbon cycle, with their very different residence times, are linked by a complex and evolving system of exchanges for which natural radiocarbon is the most robust tracer1. Any change in the sizes of these reservoirs, or the exchange rates between them, could perturb the 14C/12C ratio of each other reservoir, and the smallest of them—the atmosphere— would be the most sensitive. In particular, high-resolution reconstructions of past atmospheric 14C/12C ratios may provide important clues to the mechanisms of abrupt climate change. Annually laminated lake sediments potentially provide an optimal record in this respect, as they preserve information about both past atmospheric 14C levels and climate changes, providing absolutely dated material beyond the range of tree-ring chronologies and, unlike corals, directly monitor 14C concentrations in atmospheric CO2. Here we report the relationship between atmospheric 14C concentration and climate changes during the Younger Dryas and early Holocene periods, derived from analyses of the annually laminated sediments of Lake Gśoscia¸azz, in central Poland. We find that atmospheric 14C concentrations during the Younger Dryas were abnormally high, which we interpret as a reduced ventilation rate of the deep ocean, most probably as a result of a decrease in intensity of the North Atlantic Deep Water formation.

International audience; The exosome is a major eukaryotic nuclease located in both the nucleus and the cytoplasm that contributes to the processing, quality control and/or turnover of a large number of cellular RNAs. This large macromolecular assembly has been described as a 3'-->5' exonuclease and shown to contain a nine-subunit ring structure evolutionarily related to archaeal exosome-like complexes and bacterial polynucleotide phosphorylases. Recent results have shown that, unlike its prokaryotic counterparts, the yeast and human ring structures are catalytically inactive. In contrast, the exonucleolytic activity of the yeast exosome core was shown to be mediated by the RNB domain of the eukaryote-specific Dis3 subunit. Here we show, using in vitro assays, that yeast Dis3 has an additional endoribonuclease activity mediated by the PIN domain located at the amino terminus of this multidomain protein. Simultaneous inactivation of the endonucleolytic and exonucleolytic activities of the exosome core generates a synthetic growth phenotype in vivo, supporting a physiological function for the PIN domain. This activity is responsible for the cleavage of some natural exosome substrates, independently of exonucleolytic degradation. In contrast with current models, our results show that eukaryotic exosome cores have both endonucleolytic and exonucleolytic activities, mediated by two distinct domains of the Dis3 subunit. The mode of action of eukaryotic exosome cores in RNA processing and degradation should be reconsidered, taking into account the cooperation between its multiple ribonucleolytic activities.