Antarctic Forcing of Abrupt Global Climate Change during Oxygen Isotope Stage 3.

Abstract:

Contrasting Greenland and Antarctic temperature trends during the late Pleistocene (60 to 11.5 ka) are thought to be driven by imbalances in the rate of formation of North Atlantic and Antarctic deep water (the ‘bipolar seesaw’), with millennial-scale cooling Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events in the north leading warming in the south. Robustly testing this paradigm, however, requires a level of chronological precision currently lacking in terrestrial and marine records. Here we report a bidecadally-resolved New Zealand tree-ring sequence spanning two millennia that preserves a record of atmospheric radiocarbon (14C), allowing us to precisely align terrestrial, marine and ice sequences across a period encompassing ice-rafted debris event Heinrich 3 (H3) in the North Atlantic and Antarctic Isotope Maximum 4 (AIM4) in the Southern Hemisphere. We observe no significant difference in atmospheric and marine 14C records across H3 suggesting negligible impact on Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) but find that a climate downturn before AIM4 had a global impact, with warming in the North Atlantic (D-O 5.1) and a dramatic change in low latitude hydroclimate. Using the fully coupled CSIRO Mk3L climate system model we find that these trends are consistent with an Antarctic meltwater event propagated globally by atmospheric teleconnections. Our results suggest Southern Ocean dynamics played a significant role in driving global climate change across this period with implications for abrupt events through the late Pleistocene.