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Stable sea surface temperatures in the western Pacific warm pool over the past 1.75 million years

Abstract

About 850,000 years ago, the period of the glacial cycles changed from 41,000 to 100,000 years. This mid-Pleistocene climate transition has been attributed to global cooling, possibly caused by a decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations1,2. However, evidence for such cooling is currently restricted to the cool upwelling regions in the eastern equatorial oceans3,4, although the tropical warm pools on the western side of the ocean basins are particularly sensitive to changes in radiative forcing5,6. Here we present high-resolution records of sea surface temperatures spanning the past 1.75 million years, obtained from oxygen isotopes and Mg/Ca ratios in planktonic foraminifera from the western Pacific warm pool. In contrast with the eastern equatorial regions, sea surface temperatures in the western Pacific warm pool are relatively stable throughout the Pleistocene epoch, implying little long-term change in the tropical net radiation budget. Our results challenge the hypothesis of a gradual decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations as a dominant trigger of the longer glacial cycles since 850,000 years ago. Instead, we infer that the temperature contrast across the equatorial Pacific Ocean increased, which might have had a significant influence on the mid-Pleistocene climate transition.

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Figure 1: Pleistocene reconstruction of surface water changes in the WPWP from the IMAGES core MD97-2140.
Figure 2: Comparison of spectral analysis of δ18O and Mg/Ca-derived SST records from MD97-2140 in the late and early Pleistocene.
Figure 3: Comparison of the WPWP Pleistocene climatic evolution with palaeoclimatic records from different regions.

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Acknowledgements

The support of French MENRT, TAAF, CNRS/INSU and IPEV to the Marion-Dufresne and the IMAGES Program was necessary to perform this work. We are grateful to N. Buchet, B. Le Coat, P. Field and S. Perron-Cushman for technical help, and to A. Broccoli, A. C. Ravelo, D. Andreasen and C. Lévi for comments. This study was partially supported by Rutgers' post-doctoral fellowship to T.d.G.-T. and by the National Science Foundation to Y.R.

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Correspondence to Thibault de Garidel-Thoron.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Figure S1

This figure displays the location of the sites discussed in the text, on a map of annual mean sea surface temperatures. (DOC 233 kb)

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de Garidel-Thoron, T., Rosenthal, Y., Bassinot, F. et al. Stable sea surface temperatures in the western Pacific warm pool over the past 1.75 million years. Nature 433, 294–298 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03189

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