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Nature 422, 509-512 (3 April 2003) | doi:10.1038/nature01525; Received 15 November 2002; Accepted 20 February 2003

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Homogeneous climate variability across East Antarctica over the past three glacial cycles

O. Watanabe1, J. Jouzel2, S. Johnsen3, F. Parrenin2,4, H. Shoji5 & N. Yoshida6,7

  1. National Institute of Polar Research, 9-10 Kaga 1-chome, Itabashi-ku, Tokyo 173, Japan
  2. IPSL/Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, UMR CEA-CNRS, CE Saclay, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
  3. Department of Geophysics, Juliane Maries Vej 30, University of Copenhagen, DK-2100, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Science Institute, University of Reykjavik, Dunhaga 3, Reykjavik 107, Iceland
  4. Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l'Environnement, CNRS, BP 96, 38402, Saint Martin d'Hères, Cedex, France
  5. New Energy Resources Research Center, Kitami Institute of Technology, 165, Koen-Cho, Kitami 090-8507, Japan
  6. Frontier Collaborative Research Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 4259, Nagatsuta, Midori-ku, Yokohama 226-8502, Japan
  7. The SORST Project, Japan, Science and Technology Corporation, Kawaguchi, Saitama 332-0012, Japan

Correspondence to: J. Jouzel2 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to J.J. (e-mail: Email: jouzel@lsce.saclay.cea.fr).

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Recent ice core studies have raised the disturbing possibility that glacial–interglacial climate changes may be non-uniform across Antarctica1, 2. These findings have been confined to records from the Ross Sea sector of the continent, but significant deviations in other areas would call into question the widely assumed validity of the climate record obtained from Vostok, East Antarctica, on large spatial scales3. Here we present an isotopic profile from a core drilled at Dome Fuji4, 5, situated 1,500 km from Vostok in a different sector of East Antarctica. The two records show remarkable similarities over the past three glacial cycles (the extent of the Dome Fuji record) in both large-amplitude changes, such as terminations, interglacials and interstadials and more subtle glacial events, even when the origin of precipitation is accounted for. Our results indicate that Antarctic climate is essentially homogeneous at the scale of the East Antarctic Plateau, possibly as a consequence of the symmetry of the plateau and the adjacent ocean.