Southern Ocean Sea Ice Development Since the Last Glacial, a Combined Proxy Data-Modeling Approach

Abstract:

Southern Ocean (SO) sea ice plays a critical role in climate at global and regional scales. To advance our understanding of processes that drive and regulate sea ice there is a strong need to further extend sea ice records into the past covering a broad range of boundary conditions and time scales. We present the SO sea ice development since the last glacial using a new diatom-based transfer function (Esper and Gersonde 2014). We have enhanced a previous circumpolar reconstruction of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) (Gersonde et al. 2005) by new estimates from the hitherto not well-explored Pacific sector. This corroborates earlier results that LGM winter sea ice was expanded by ca. 100% compared to present. Time-series documenting the past 30,000 yrs are available from 29 sites from the western Indian, the Atlantic and the Pacific sectors. In general, the records suggest a post-glacial sea ice retreat between 18,000–15,000 yrs followed by a slight expansion during the Antarctic Cold Reversal. Minimum sea ice extent was reached in the early Holocene. Around 8.000 yrs ago we observe a re-expansion of sea ice, primarily in the Ross and the Weddell/Scotia Sea sectors. This general pattern is also mirrored by sea ice proxy records (ssNa flux) obtained from Antarctic ice cores. However, the marine records show that the sea ice development is subject to spatial heterogeneity related to SO circulation systems and bottom topography, and to land/ocean distribution. This may lead to area-specific expansions and latitudinal gradients in sea ice concentration with implications on climate-relevant factors e.g. albedo, ocean/atmosphere exchange, moisture distribution, water mass generation and biological productivity. The obtained proxy data are compared with scenarios from Earth system modelling (e.g. Zhang et al., 2013) to verify the outcome of numerical modeling, to test the potential of models to bridge gaps in the proxy-based record (e.g. summer sea ice extent, areas lacking proxy-based sedimentary signals) and to elaborate and quantify physical processes that force and amplify SO sea ice at different climate conditions.