**6. Conclusions**

On the basis of a record of planktonic foraminifera shell weights from a sediment core in the eastern tropical north Atlantic, we provide evidence of steady carbonate productivity in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean during the last two climatic cycles. A multiproxy dissolution assessment found foraminiferal carbonate to be well preserved, and the consistency in the measured shell masses is a reliable indication of stable foraminifera biomineralization strength, independent of changes in atmospheric *p*CO2. We attribute this invariability in the mass of *G. bulloides* shells to the stability of the local hydrologic conditions, which also reveals stability in the position of the ITCZ during the last two glacial–interglacial stages. Furthermore, the enhanced preservation of the foraminiferal record indicates that the Cape Verde plateau remained under the influence of the non-corrosive NADW during the study interval.

The geochemical analysis of the samples surrounding the termination revealed a freshening of the surface waters prior to PGM, which coincided with freshwater pulses or the reactivation of a sub-Saharan drainage system. Furthermore, the reported relationship between *G. bulloides* shell weight and ambient seawater densities was verified, reinforcing the use of foraminifera shell weight as a hydrological indicator. The X-ray tomographic analysis of selected samples allowed the determination of volume normalized weights and revealed that the spike observed in the *G. bulloides* shell weight record during T-II is an artifact of specimen contamination by clay infillings. Overall, the tomographic analysis proved to be a very powerful micropaleontological tool for the determination of key shell characteristics (e.g., cell volume, shell thickness, porosity), which are important for paleoclimatic studies.

**Supplementary Materials:** The following are available online at http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/8/10/737/s1.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization and original draft preparation, S.D.Z.; Geochemical analyses and data curation, M.G.; X-ray micro computed tomographic analyses, V.F.; review and editing, P.G.M., G.K., V.F., H.D., A.A., and M.G.; supervision, A.A. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding. The article processing charges for this open-access publication were covered by the University of Athens.

**Acknowledgments:** We would like to thank the Geosciences department of the University of Bremen for providing sediment core material and scanning electron microscope facilities. We would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the handling editorial team for their constructive comments, which helped to considerably improve this manuscript.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

**Availability of Supporting Data:** Supporting micro-CT data of the scanned specimens used in the paper are available for inspection from the GigaScience database (GigaDB) repository [54]. The acquired geochemical and micropaleontological data are available in the Supplementary Tables.
