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Patterns and mechanisms of early Pliocene warmth

Nature volume 496, pages 43–49 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

About five to four million years ago, in the early Pliocene epoch, Earth had a warm, temperate climate. The gradual cooling that followed led to the establishment of modern temperature patterns, possibly in response to a decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentration, of the order of 100 parts per million, towards preindustrial values. Here we synthesize the available geochemical proxy records of sea surface temperature and show that, compared with that of today, the early Pliocene climate had substantially lower meridional and zonal temperature gradients but similar maximum ocean temperatures. Using an Earth system model, we show that none of the mechanisms currently proposed to explain Pliocene warmth can simultaneously reproduce all three crucial features. We suggest that a combination of several dynamical feedbacks underestimated in the models at present, such as those related to ocean mixing and cloud albedo, may have been responsible for these climate conditions.

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Figure 1: Climate evolution over the past 5 Myr.
Figure 2: Temperature evolution over the past 5 Myr in different regions of the ocean.
Figure 3: Temperature changes in different regions of the ocean.
Figure 4: Evolution of SST gradients since 4–5 Myr ago.
Figure 5: Testing mechanisms of Pliocene warmth and reduced temperature gradients.
Figure 6: Global surface air temperature anomalies in two experiments.

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Acknowledgements

Financial support was provided by the grants to A.V.F. and K.T.L. from the US National Science Foundation (OCE-0901921 and OCE-0623310), the US Department of Energy Office of Science (DE-SC0007037) and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Most of the data compiled in this study comes from samples collected by the Deep Sea Drilling Project, the Ocean Drilling Program, and the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, supported by the National Science Foundation. This work was supported in part by the Yale University Faculty of Arts and Sciences High Performance Computing facility. A.V.F. thanks G. Philander, P. deMenocal, T. Herbert, Y. Rosenthal, A. Haywood, D. Lunt, M. Barreiro, E. Tziperman, D. Battisti, M. Cane and C. Wunsch for discussions of this topic. We are grateful to a great number of scientists who provided the data used in this study.

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Author notes

  1. A. V. Fedorov, C. M. Brierley and K. T. Lawrence: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University, New Haven, 06511, Connecticut, USA

    A. V. Fedorov & C. M. Brierley

  2. Department of Geography, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK,

    C. M. Brierley

  3. Department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences, Lafayette College, Easton, 18042, Pennsylvania, USA

    K. T. Lawrence

  4. Department of Earth Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Z. Liu

  5. Department of Geosciences, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, 94132, California, USA

    P. S. Dekens

  6. Department of Ocean Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, 95064, California, USA

    A. C. Ravelo

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Contributions

A.V.F., K.T.L. and C.M.B. coordinated the manuscript and contributed equally to writing the manuscript and to the ideas it contains; K.T.L. compiled the SST data with Z.L. (alkenones) and P.S.D. (Mg/Ca). C.M.B. performed the model simulations with A.V.F.; A.V.F. compiled the CO2 data. A.C.R. helped to interpret the data. All authors were involved in the writing at different stages of the work on this manuscript.

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Correspondence to A. V. Fedorov.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Tables 1-3 and Supplementary Figures 1-13. (PDF 3122 kb)

Supplementary Data

This file contains oxygen isotopes, magnetic susceptibility and carbon dioxide estimates for the past five million years. This data is shown in figure 1. (XLS 743 kb)

Supplementary Data

This file contains sea surface temperature estimates, both at their original time resolution and temporally smoothed. These estimates are those shown in figures 2-3 and Supplementary Figures 4-9. Further processing of this data, as described in the Methods, allows replication of Supplementary Figures 1-3 and 10. (XLS 8566 kb)

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Fedorov, A., Brierley, C., Lawrence, K. et al. Patterns and mechanisms of early Pliocene warmth. Nature 496, 43–49 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12003

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