Editor's Summary
9 November 2006
A climate seesaw
A new ice core drilled in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica, as part of the EPICA project is special for two reasons. First, its geographic location; facing the South Atlantic it represents the first direct Antarctic counterpart of the Greenland ice core records with both regions being potentially coupled by the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. And second, its high accumulation rate compared to other nearby drill sites provides much higher resolution as well as improved synchronization to the Greenland records. The new core's 150,000-year climate record reveals that a 'bipolar seesaw' holds not only for the large warmings in Antarctica, but also for each (smaller) Dansgaard-Oeschger event in the north, which has its counterpart in the Antarctic. The amplitude of the warming in the south is linearly dependent on the duration of the concurrent stadial in the north, providing independent evidence for the bipolar seesaw concept.
News and Views: Climate change: The south–north connection
A new ice-core record from Antarctica provides the best evidence yet of a link between climate in the northern and southern polar regions that operates through changes in ocean circulation.
Eric J. Steig
doi:10.1038/444152a
Letter: One-to-one coupling of glacial climate variability in Greenland and Antarctica
and EPICA Community Members and EPICA Community Members
doi:10.1038/nature05301
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