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Strengthening of North American dust sources during the late Pliocene (2.7 Ma)

  • Here we present orbitally-resolved records of terrestrial higher plant leaf wax input to the North Atlantic over the last 3.5 Ma, based on the accumulation of long-chain n-alkanes and n-alkanl-1-ols at IODP Site U1313. These lipids are a major component of dust, even in remote ocean areas, and have a predominantly aeolian origin in distal marine sediments. Our results demonstrate that around 2.7 million years ago (Ma), coinciding with the intensification of the Northern Hemisphere glaciation (NHG), the aeolian input of terrestrial material to the North Atlantic increased drastically. Since then, during every glacial the aeolian input of higher plant material was up to 30 times higher than during interglacials. The close correspondence between aeolian input to the North Atlantic and other dust records indicates a globally uniform response of dust sources to Quaternary climate variability, although the amplitude of variation differs among areas. We argue that the increased aeolian input at Site U1313 during glacials is predominantlyHere we present orbitally-resolved records of terrestrial higher plant leaf wax input to the North Atlantic over the last 3.5 Ma, based on the accumulation of long-chain n-alkanes and n-alkanl-1-ols at IODP Site U1313. These lipids are a major component of dust, even in remote ocean areas, and have a predominantly aeolian origin in distal marine sediments. Our results demonstrate that around 2.7 million years ago (Ma), coinciding with the intensification of the Northern Hemisphere glaciation (NHG), the aeolian input of terrestrial material to the North Atlantic increased drastically. Since then, during every glacial the aeolian input of higher plant material was up to 30 times higher than during interglacials. The close correspondence between aeolian input to the North Atlantic and other dust records indicates a globally uniform response of dust sources to Quaternary climate variability, although the amplitude of variation differs among areas. We argue that the increased aeolian input at Site U1313 during glacials is predominantly related to the episodic appearance of continental ice sheets in North America and the associated strengthening of glaciogenic dust sources. Evolutional spectral analyses of the n-alkane records were therefore used to determine the dominant astronomical forcing in North American ice sheet advances. These results demonstrate that during the early Pleistocene North American ice sheet dynamics responded predominantly to variations in obliquity (41 ka), which argues against previous suggestions of precession-related variations in Northern Hemisphere ice sheets during the early Pleistocene.show moreshow less

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Metadaten
Author details:B. David A. Naafs, Jens HefterORCiD, Gary Acton, Gerald H. Haug, Alfredo Martinez-Garcia, Richard Pancost, Rüdiger Stein
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2011.11.026
ISSN:0012-821X
ISSN:1385-013X
Title of parent work (English):Earth & planetary science letters
Publisher:Elsevier
Place of publishing:Amsterdam
Publication type:Article
Language:English
Year of first publication:2012
Publication year:2012
Release date:2017/03/26
Tag:Milankovitch; North Atlantic; Quaternary; aeolian input; dust; terrestrial higher plant waxes
Volume:317
Number of pages:12
First page:8
Last Page:19
Funding institution:Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG); ECORD; NSF-ODP [0549676]
Organizational units:Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Geowissenschaften
Peer review:Referiert
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