This study presents an innovative approach to reconstructing historical thunderstorm and hail activity using documentary evidence. It combines a systematic, source-critical analysis with Transformer-based language models. A particular strength lies in the development of a structured classification framework that accounts for differences in source types, linguistic variability, and uncertainty while yielding physically plausible long-term patterns in convective weather observations. Applying ThunderstormBERT and HailBERT further demonstrates the potential of automated, language-based methods to efficiently extract meteorological information from large, heterogeneous historical archives. The analysis reveals the robustness of the reconstructed hail and thunderstorm signals, as well as the challenges associated with intermediate-intensity and winter events. Overall, the manuscript offers a reproducible framework for transforming historical textual evidence into quantitative climate information, providing a promising basis for extending the observational record of long-term convective weather variability.

After a discussion among the co-editors-in-chief of Climate of the Past, we decided to support the handling editor's proposal to highlight this paper. Based on measurements of iron, acidity, and conductivity from the EGRIP ice core, the study suggests that the iron hypothesis may be less effective than previously thought in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in the Fe-limited North Pacific Ocean. Despite a strong increase in total atmospheric iron deposition, the fraction of iron more likely to be available to phytoplankton increased only modestly. The findings suggest that other factors, such as sea-ice extent or iron remobilization from sediments, may have played a more relevant role than atmospheric iron deposition in regulating marine primary productivity during the last glacial transition. denis-didier Rousseau on behalf of CP leadership

The manuscript by Herzschuh et al. presents a novel approach for deriving quantitative summer temperature estimates from Lake sediments. This method has the potential to substantially improve terrestrial temperature reconstructions and thereby advance our understanding of past continental climate change.

This manuscript introduces an innovative method for identifying cryptotephra in Antarctic ice cores, which could lead to significant new findings at Mount Brown South (MBS) and throughout Antarctica. The manuscript describes the identification of two new cryptotephra horizons in the MBS ice core from Wilhelm II Land in Antarctica. These cryptotephra originate from the mid-1980s eruptive period of Mt. Erebus and the cataclysmic 1991 eruption of Cerro Hudson. These two tephra horizons are an important addition to the East Antarctic tephrochronological framework. The findings of this study challenge previous assumptions about transport trajectories and pathways and satellite-era ice core chronologies, offering new insights into atmospheric circulation dynamics.

The goal of the paper presented by M. Meijers et al. is to present a new, large data set of stable carbon isotope analyses performed on carbonates from late Miocene to Holocene sites in Anatolia. By combining their analyses with previously published carbonate d13C data, as well as published paleoclimate estimates from the region, the authors demonstrate secular changes and restructuring of paleofloral communities since ~10 Ma. Despite being a hotspot of projected anthropogenic climatic change, the evolutionary and climatic processes that shaped terrestrial ecosystems in the northeastern Mediterranean over the last 10 million years remain largely elusive. Whereas the expansion of C4 grasslands is well documented in regions such as eastern Africa and southern Asia, the dynamics in western Eurasia remain poorly understood. This gap in knowledge is critical for our understanding of how terrestrial ecosystems respond to large climatic shifts over geological timescales. In this manuscript, we present the first comprehensive stable carbon isotope record of pedogenic carbonates from Anatolia (Türkiye), spanning the last ten million years. Our results reveal that C4 grasslands in this region emerged during Late Miocene Global Cooling, simultaneously with southern Asian localities. Our study offers a unique perspective on a striking and largely unexpected feature: the permanent return to C3-dominated vegetation during the Early Pliocene – a phenomenon not observed elsewhere. We propose that this reversal to C3 vegetation was driven by regional hydroclimatic changes, in particular by a transition in rainfall seasonality, from a summer-dominated precipitation regime to a Mediterranean-style winter precipitation regime.