Downslope strengthening millennial-scale climatic change signals deduced from high-resolution clay mineralogy during the last glaciation in the northern South China Sea

Abstract:

Clay mineralogy provides a powerful tool to reconstruct glacial-cyclic paleoceanographic and paleoclimatic changes in the South China Sea. However, whether the clay mineralogy could also reserve millennial-scale climatic change is still poorly understood, because clay minerals usually produced through the long-term chemical weathering are not sensitive to the fast environmental change. This study presents the high-resolution clay mineralogy of three high-quality sediment cores, which were retrieved from a transect on the continental slope of the northern South China Sea during the cruise of MD190 (2012). Our results show that time series changes of clay mineral assemblages display a clear occurrence of millennial-scale climatic change events, such as Younger Dryas, Bolling-Allerod, and Heinrich events 1-6. The reconstructed relative contributions of clay minerals from their source areas of Taiwan and Luzon are closely related to the millennial-scale climatic changes, while the clay mineral contribution from the source area of the Pearl River presents a relationship to the sea level change. Following the transect with increasing water depths, the Pearl River contribution decreases, whereas the Taiwan and Luzon contributions present more complex changes, and the millennial-scale climatic change signals are also gradually strengthened. The Luzon/Taiwan contribution ratio is used for the proxy of the millennial-scale paleoclimate evolution. The lower ratio presents colder events, while the high ratio indicates warmer periods. The distinct downslope strengthening millennial-scale climatic change indicates that deepwater sediments in the South China Sea could well reserve fast climatic change events that usually occurred in high latitudes.