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The Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations and Heinrich events described in North Atlantic sediments and Greenland ice are expressed in the climate of the tropics, for example, as documented in Arabian Sea sediments. Given the strength of this teleconnection, we seek to reconstruct its range of environmental impacts. We present geochemical and sedimentological data from core SO130-289KL from the Indus submarine slope spanning the last similar to 80 kyr. Elemental and grain size analyses consistently indicate that interstadials are characterized by an increased contribution of fluvial suspension from the Indus River. In contrast, stadials are characterized by an increased contribution of aeolian dust from the Arabian Peninsula. Decadal-scale shifts at climate transitions, such as onsets of interstadials, were coeval with changes in productivity-related proxies. Heinrich events stand out as especially dry and dusty events, indicating a dramatically weakened Indian summer monsoon, potentially increased winter monsoon circulation, and increased aridity on the Arabian Peninsula. This finding is consistent with other paleoclimate evidence for continental aridity in the northern tropics during these events. Our results strengthen the evidence that circum-North Atlantic temperature variations translate to hydrological shifts in the tropics, with major impacts on regional environmental conditions such as rainfall, river discharge, aeolian dust transport, and ocean margin anoxia.
Sedimentary proxies used to reconstruct marine productivity suffer from variable preservation and are sensitive to factors other than productivity. Therefore, proxy calibration is warranted. Here we map the spatial patterns of two paleoproductivity proxies, biogenic opal and barium fluxes, from a set of core-top sediments recovered in the Subarctic North Pacific. Comparisons of the proxy data with independent estimates of primary and export production, surface water macronutrient concentrations, and biological pCO(2) drawdown indicate that neither proxy shows a significant correlation with primary or export productivity for the entire region. Biogenic opal fluxes, when corrected for preservation using Th-230-normalized accumulation rates, show a good correlation with primary productivity along the volcanic arcs (tau = 0.71, p = 0.0024) and with export productivity throughout the western Subarctic North Pacific (tau = 0.71, p = 0.0107). Moderate and good correlations of biogenic barium flux with export production (tau = 0.57, p = 0.0022) and with surface water silicate concentrations (tau = 0.70, p = 0.0002) are observed for the central and eastern Subarctic North Pacific. For reasons unknown, however, no correlation is found in the western Subarctic North Pacific between biogenic barium flux and the reference data. Nonetheless, we show that barite saturation, uncertainty in the lithogenic barium corrections, and problems with the reference data sets are not responsible for the lack of a significant correlation between biogenic barium flux and the reference data. Further studies evaluating the factors controlling the variability of the biogenic constituents in the sediments are desirable in this region.
The presence of a low-to mid-latitude interhemispheric hydrologic seesaw is apparent over orbital and glacial-interglacial timescales, but its existence over the most recent past remains unclear. Here we investigate, based on climate proxy reconstructions from both hemispheres, the inter-hemispherical phasing of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and the low-to mid-latitude teleconnections in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 2000 years. A clear feature is a persistent southward shift of the ITCZ during the Little Ice Age until the beginning of the 19th Century. Strong covariation between our new composite ITCZ-stack and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) records reveals a tight coupling between these two synoptic weather and climate phenomena over decadal-to-centennial timescales. This relationship becomes most apparent when comparing two precisely dated, high-resolution paleorainfall records from Belize and Scotland, indicating that the low-to mid-latitude teleconnection was also active over annual-decadal timescales. It is likely a combination of external forcing, i.e., solar and volcanic, and internal feedbacks, that drives the synchronous ITCZ and NAO shifts via energy flux perturbations in the tropics.
Global climate and the atmospheric partial pressure of carbon dioxide (p(CO2atm)) are correlated over recent glacial cycles, with lower p(CO2atm) during ice ages, but the causes of the p(CO2atm) changes are unknown. The modern Southern Ocean releases deeply sequestered CO2 to the atmosphere. Growing evidence suggests that the Southern Ocean CO2 'leak' was stemmed during ice ages, increasing ocean CO2 storage. Such a change would also have made the global ocean more alkaline, driving additional ocean CO2 uptake. This explanation for lower ice-age p(CO2atm), if correct, has much to teach us about the controls on current ocean processes.
Measurements of benthic foraminiferal cadmium:calcium (Cd/Ca) have indicated that the glacial-interglacial change in deep North Pacific phosphate (PO4) concentration was minimal which has been taken by some, workers as a sign that the biological pump did not store more carbon in the deep glacial ocean. Here we present sedimentary redox- sensitive trace metal records from Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Site 882 (NW subarctic Pacific, water depth 3244 m) to make inferences about changes in deep North Pacific oxygenation and thus respired carbon storage - over the past 150,000 yr. These observations are complemented with biogenic barium and opal measurements as indicators for past organic carbon export to separate the influences of deep-water oxygen concentration and sedimentary organic carbon respiration on the redox state of the sediment. Our results suggest that the deep subarctic Pacific water mass was deleted in ox en during glacial maxima, though it was not anoxic. We reconcile our results with the existing benthic foraminiferal Cd/Ca by invoking a decrease in the fraction of the deep ocean nutrient inventory that was preformed, rather than remineralized. This change would have corresponded to an increase in the deep Pacific storage of respired carbon, which Would have lowered atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) by sequestering CO2 away from the atmosphere and by increasing ocean alkalinity through a transient dissolution event in the deep sea. The magnitude of change in preformed nutrients suggested by the North Pacific data Would have accounted for a majority of the observed decrease in glacial atmospheric PCO2.
To calibrate delta O-18 time-series from speleothems in the eastern Indian summer monsoon (ISM) region of India, and to understand the moisture regime over the northern Bay of Bengal (BoB) we analyze the delta O-18 and delta D of rainwater, collected in 2007 and 2008 near Cherrapunji, India. delta D values range from + 18.5 parts per thousand to 144.4 parts per thousand, while delta O-18 varies between +0.8 parts per thousand and 18.8 parts per thousand. The Local Meteoric Water Line (LMWL) is found to be indistinguishable from the Global Meteoric Water Line (GMWL). Late ISM (September-October) rainfall exhibits lowest delta O-18 and delta D values, with little relationship to the local precipitation amount. There is a trend to lighter isotope values over the course of the ISM, but it does not correlate with the patterns of temperature and rainfall amount delta O-18 and delta D time-series have to be interpreted with caution in terms of the 'amount effect' in this subtropical region. We find that the temporal trend in delta O-18 reflects increasing transport distance during the ISM, isotopic changes in the northern BoB surface waters during late ISM, and vapor re-equilibration with rain droplets. Using an isotope box model for surface ocean waters, we quantify the potential influence of river runoff on the isotopic composition of the seasonal freshwater plume in the northern BoB. Temporal variations in this source can contribute up to 25% of the observed changes in stable isotopes of precipitation in NE India. To delineate other moisture sources, we use backward trajectory computations and find a strong correlation between source region and isotopic composition. Palaeoclimatic stable isotope time-series from northeast Indian speleothems likely reflect changes in moisture source and transport pathway, as well as the isotopic composition of the BoB surface water, all of which in turn reflect ISM strength. Stalagmite records from the region can therefore be interpreted as integrated measures of the ISM strength.
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 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.
Dust has the potential to modify global climate by influencing the radiative balance of the atmosphere and by supplying iron and other essential limiting micronutrients to the ocean(1,2). Indeed, dust supply to the Southern Ocean increases during ice ages, and 'iron fertilization' of the subantarctic zone may have contributed up to 40 parts per million by volume (p. p. m. v.) of the decrease (80-100 p. p. m. v.) in atmospheric carbon dioxide observed during late Pleistocene glacial cycles(3-7). So far, however, the magnitude of Southern Ocean dust deposition in earlier times and its role in the development and evolution of Pleistocene glacial cycles have remained unclear. Here we report a high-resolution record of dust and iron supply to the Southern Ocean over the past four million years, derived from the analysis of marine sediments from ODP Site 1090, located in the Atlantic sector of the subantarctic zone. The close correspondence of our dust and iron deposition records with Antarctic ice core reconstructions of dust flux covering the past 800,000 years (refs 8, 9) indicates that both of these archives record large-scale deposition changes that should apply to most of the Southern Ocean, validating previous interpretations of the ice core data. The extension of the record beyond the interval covered by the Antarctic ice cores reveals that, in contrast to the relatively gradual intensification of glacial cycles over the past three million years, Southern Ocean dust and iron flux rose sharply at the Mid-Pleistocene climatic transition around 1.25 million years ago. This finding complements previous observations over late Pleistocene glacial cycles(5,8,9), providing new evidence of a tight connection between high dust input to the Southern Ocean and the emergence of the deep glaciations that characterize the past one million years of Earth history.
Severely negative Delta(14)C anomalies from the mid-depth Pacific and the Arabian Sea have been taken as support for the hypothesized deglacial release of a previously isolated, extremely (14)C-deplete deep ocean carbon reservoir. We report box model simulations that cast doubt on both the existence of the hypothesized deep reservoir and its ability to explain the mid-depth Delta(14)C anomalies. First, the degree of ice age isolation needed to substantially reduce the deep Delta(14)C of the deep reservoir causes anoxia and the trapping of alkalinity from CaCO(3) dissolution, the latter increasing atmospheric CO(2). Second, even with a completely (14)C-free deep reservoir, achieving the mid-depth Delta(14)C anomalies of observed duration requires ad hoc stifling of aspects of deep circulation to prevent rapid dissipation of the anomalous (14)C-free carbon to the rest of the ocean and the atmosphere. We suggest that the mid-depth anomalies do not record basin-scale Delta(14)C changes but are instead local phenomena.
The hypersaline crater lake and its catchment on seabird island Isabel (Pacific, off Mexico) was studied to explore the influence of strong seasonal variations in rainfall/evaporation and guano contribution on its limnology. The hypersaline lake water (HSW, 78 %) is up to 2.2-times enriched in inert ions relative to mean seawater. Rainfall during summer dilutes the HSW to form a less saline rainwater body (RWB) above a chemolimnion between 2 and 4 m water depth. The RWB is inhabited first by diatoms and ostracods followed later on by cyanobacteria and ciliates. Evaporation of > 1.5 m depth of lake water over the dry season increases the salinity of the RWB until the water column becomes isohaline at HSW concentrations in the late dry season. Differences in the stable isotope composition of water and primary producers in RWB and HSW reflect this development. Introduction of seabird guano and the decrease of salinity fuel a high primary production in the RWB with higher delta(CDIC)-C-13 and delta(13)Corg of particulate organic matter than in the HSW. The high N supply leads to high delta N-15 NH4 values (+ 39 % in the HSW) as the consequence of ammonia volatilization that is strongest during guano maturation and with evaporative salinity increase from the HSW. Precipitation of carbonate (calcite and aragonite) from the RWB and the HSW is hindered by the high concentration of guano-derived P. This inhibition may be overcome with evaporative supersaturation during particularly dry conditions. Carbonate may also precipitate during particularly wet conditions from the dilute RWB, where the P-concentration is reduced during an active phytoplankton production that raises the pH. Differences in the stable isotope signatures of carbon and oxygen in HSW and RWB (+ 5 % delta(CDIC)-C-13 and -3 % d18OH2O) suggest the processes of carbonate precipitation can be distinguished based on the isotope signature of the carbonates deposited. Changes in the lake system are indicated when lower temperatures and higher rainfall in the 2006 wet season introduced more and less mature guano to the lake. The lower pH was accompanied by lower ammonia volatilization and carbonate precipitation as indicated by an increased concentration of NH4, Ca, Sr and DIC, while delta H-2, delta(NNH4)-N-15, and salinity were lower. According to our results, the observed sediment laminations should reflect the introduction of catchment material (including guano) with runoff, the RWB plankton production, and the carbonate precipitation in relation to its origin and seasonality.