Oceanic and Climate phasing analysis across Marine Isotope Stage 3

Abstract:

Glacial climate oscillated between cold stadial periods similar to the Last Glacial Maximum and warmer periods more similar to today from 25,000 to 60,000 years BP, an envelop of time referred to as marine isotope stage three (MIS3). The sudden warmings (Dansgaard-Oeschger events) and ice sheet surges (Heinrich events) have long captured researchers’ attention as a means of exploring significant perturbations to the climate system. The climate dynamics associated with these events have been recently elucidated throughhigh-resolution analysis of ice and sediment core archives. In particular, it has been recently demonstrated through synchronization of Greenlandic and Antarctic ice cores that abrupt climate events propagated from the Northern to Southern hemisphere. Likewise, during Heinrich events ice rafted detritus appeared in the Northern North Atlantic generally after cold stadial conditions had already been established. These results indict the ocean’s conveyor as the vehicle hemispheric partitioning heat across these events. Here we test the phased response of multiple paleoproxies sensitive to circulation across these abrupt climate events through all of MIS3.

Through correlation analysis of multiple paleoproxy records generated from a high accumulation sediment core taken from the Bermuda Rise, we examine the phase relationship of high latitude climate records with the kinematic circulation proxy Pa/Th, benthic d¹³C and d¹⁸O, SST, d¹⁸O_sw, CaCO₃ content, ²³⁰Th-normalized bulk and component fluxes in order to infer the sequence of change across these abrupt millennial events. We find that shifts in water mass composition precede increases in temperatures across the identified time interval, while the export of Pa relative to Th increases in tandem with changes in with Bermuda Rise SST estimates during warmings, but lags during cooling. Rapid shifts in thorium normalized carbonate flux supply secondary evidence for changes in preservation accompanying changes in water mass chemistry.