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Northern Hemisphere forcing of Southern Hemisphere climate during the last deglaciation

Nature volume 494, pages 81–85 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

According to the Milankovitch theory, changes in summer insolation in the high-latitude Northern Hemisphere caused glacial cycles through their impact on ice-sheet mass balance1. Statistical analyses of long climate records supported this theory, but they also posed a substantial challenge by showing that changes in Southern Hemisphere climate were in phase with or led those in the north2. Although an orbitally forced Northern Hemisphere signal may have been transmitted to the Southern Hemisphere3, insolation forcing can also directly influence local Southern Hemisphere climate, potentially intensified by sea-ice feedback4,5,6, suggesting that the hemispheres may have responded independently to different aspects of orbital forcing. Signal processing of climate records cannot distinguish between these conditions, however, because the proposed insolation forcings share essentially identical variability7. Here we use transient simulations with a coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model to identify the impacts of forcing from changes in orbits, atmospheric CO2 concentration, ice sheets and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) on hemispheric temperatures during the first half of the last deglaciation (22–14.3 kyr bp). Although based on a single model, our transient simulation with only orbital changes supports the Milankovitch theory in showing that the last deglaciation was initiated by rising insolation during spring and summer in the mid-latitude to high-latitude Northern Hemisphere and by terrestrial snow–albedo feedback. The simulation with all forcings best reproduces the timing and magnitude of surface temperature evolution in the Southern Hemisphere in deglacial proxy records8,9. AMOC changes associated with an orbitally induced retreat of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets10 is the most plausible explanation for the early Southern Hemisphere deglacial warming and its lead over Northern Hemisphere temperature; the ensuing rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration provided the critical feedback on global deglaciation9,11.

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Figure 1: Comparison of data and models for SH regional temperature stacks.
Figure 2: Comparison of the deglacial warming between the NH and the SH in simulation ORB.
Figure 3: Early deglacial warming in single-forcing transient simulations.
Figure 4: Spatial correlation of temperature changes of deglacial proxy temperature records9 and transient simulations between 19 and 17 kyr  bp.

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Acknowledgements

We thank O. Timm and A. Timmermann for fruitful discussions, and G. Chen for providing the conversion code for fix-angular calendar. We thank the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research for continuous development of the community Earth system model. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, located in the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the Department of Energy under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. F.H. is supported by the US National Science Foundation (AGS-0902802, AGS-1203430) and the Climate, People, and the Environment Program. P.U.C. and J.D.S. were supported by the Paleoclimate Program of the National Science Foundation through project PALEOVAR (06023950-ATM). This is CCR contribution no. 1130.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Climatic Research, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, 53706, Wisconsin, USA

    Feng He, Anders E. Carlson, Zhengyu Liu & John E. Kutzbach

  2. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Jeremy D. Shakun

  3. College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, 97331, Oregon, USA

    Peter U. Clark & Anders E. Carlson

  4. Department of Geoscience, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, 53706, Wisconsin, USA

    Anders E. Carlson

  5. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, 53706, Wisconsin, USA

    Zhengyu Liu

  6. Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, 80307, Colorado, USA

    Bette L. Otto-Bliesner

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  1. Feng He
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Contributions

F.H. and Z.L. conceived this study. F.H. initiated and performed all the single-forcing transient simulations and wrote the manuscript with P.U.C. J.D.S. provided and synthesized the proxy data. A.E.C. and P.U.C. constructed the meltwater forcing schemes with F.H., Z.L. and B.O.-B. Z.L. and B.O.-B. initiated the transient simulation project and provided the computational resources. J.E.K. helped interpret the calendar effect of insolation. All authors discussed the results and provided input on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Feng He.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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This file contains Supplementary Figures 1-28, Supplementary Discussions 1-2 and Supplementary References. (PDF 3489 kb)

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He, F., Shakun, J., Clark, P. et al. Northern Hemisphere forcing of Southern Hemisphere climate during the last deglaciation. Nature 494, 81–85 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11822

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