Palaeoceanography articles within Nature Geoscience

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  • News & Views |

    Whether interannual variability in the Pacific Ocean was a feature of the warm Pliocene climate is debated. Variance in reconstructed eastern tropical Pacific surface temperatures provides strong support for persistent El Niño activity at this time.

    • Anna S. von der Heydt
    •  & Henk A. Dijkstra

  • Article |

    The southern San Andreas fault terminates in a stepover zone — several small faults that separate major fault segments — beneath the Salton Sea. Analysis of movements on the stepover zone faults indicates that periodic flooding of the palaeo-Salton Sea during the late Holocene could have triggered earthquakes on the San Andreas fault.

    • Daniel Brothers
    • , Debi Kilb
    •  & Graham Kent

  • Article |

    Estimates for sea level three million years ago, a period with similar atmospheric CO2 levels to today, vary from 10 to 40 m above present. Glacial isostatic adjustment modelling suggests that variations in the height of palaeoshorelines result from the residual adjustment of continental flexure following recent glaciations.

    • Maureen E. Raymo
    • , Jerry X. Mitrovica
    •  & Paul J. Hearty

  • News & Views |

    The contribution of the East Antarctic ice sheet to the 120 m of sea-level rise since the Last Glacial Maximum is unclear. New terrestrial and marine data suggest the thinning of East Antarctic ice was responsible for only a metre of this rise.

    • George H. Denton

  • News & Views |

    • Alicia Newton

  • Letter |

    The eruption of the Siberian Trap flood basalts resulted in the heating and combustion of coals and organic-rich sediments at the time of the Permian mass extinction. The presence of char in distant lake sediments linked to the eruption suggests that fly ash could have been generated by the coal combustion, and then dispersed globally, creating toxic marine conditions.

    • Stephen E. Grasby
    • , Hamed Sanei
    •  & Benoit Beauchamp

  • Article |

    The East Antarctic ice sheet retreated at the end of the last glacial period. Terrestrial and marine data suggest that the retreat began 14,000 years ago, indicating that the East Antarctic ice sheet probably did not contribute to meltwater pulse 1a 14,700 years ago.

    • Andrew Mackintosh
    • , Nicholas Golledge
    •  & Caroline Lavoie

  • Letter |

    During the last deglaciation, climate changes over Greenland and Antarctica on millennial timescales were asynchronous. A temperature record from the Talos Dome in Antarctica confirms this asynchrony and shows clear regional differences in deglacial warming between the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic sectors of Antarctica.

    • B. Stenni
    • , D. Buiron
    •  & R. Udisti

  • News & Views |

    The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago was triggered by the sudden release of carbon to the ocean–atmosphere system. The carbon may have been removed almost as abruptly 100,000 years later, in the form of organic carbon.

    • David Archer

  • Letter |

    The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum warm event about 56 million years ago was caused by the release of large amounts of carbon to the ocean and atmosphere. Estimates of the rate of recovery from the event suggest that about 2,000 Pg of the carbon released was sequestered as organic carbon.

    • Gabriel J. Bowen
    •  & James C. Zachos

  • Article |

    The photosynthetic production of oxygen in the ocean is thought to have begun at least 2.7 billion years ago. The geochemistry of marine sediments deposited 2.6 billion years ago suggests that ocean margins were oxygenated at least 100 million years before the first significant increase in atmospheric oxygen concentrations.

    • Brian Kendall
    • , Christopher T. Reinhard
    •  & Ariel D. Anbar

  • Article |

    The western Pacific warm pool and the Indonesian throughflow affect tropical climate and atmospheric convection. Marine sediment records reveal uniformly elevated temperatures from 10,000 to 7,000 years ago, despite the initiation of modern Indonesian throughflow circulation about 9,500 years ago.

    • Braddock K. Linsley
    • , Yair Rosenthal
    •  & Delia W. Oppo

  • Article |

    The termination of the last glacial period was punctuated by the collapse and resumption of Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. Sedimentary records from the South Atlantic Ocean indicate that an unusually deep limb of North Atlantic Deep Water formed after the resumption of overturning circulation during the Bølling–Allerød warm event.

    • Stephen Barker
    • , Gregor Knorr
    •  & Luke C. Skinner

  • News & Views |

    The timing and nature of changes in the chemistry of the early oceans are intensely debated. Geochemical analyses show that a prominent transition to sulphidic marine conditions 1.8 billion years ago may have been restricted to near-shore environments.

    • David Fike

  • Letter |

    The deposition of iron formations ceased about 1.84 billion years ago. Reconstructions of ocean chemistry suggest that the advent of euxinic conditions along ocean margins preferentially removed dissolved iron from the water column in the form of the mineral pyrite, inhibiting widespread iron-oxide mineral deposition.

    • Simon W. Poulton
    • , Philip W. Fralick
    •  & Donald E. Canfield

  • News & Views |

    Low atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during glacial periods must have been accompanied by changes in surface-ocean carbonate chemistry. But it is unclear whether concurrent changes in the deep sea contributed to the glacial carbon dioxide decline.

    • Richard E. Zeebe
    •  & Thomas M. Marchitto Jr

  • Letter |

    Natural petroleum seepage emits large volumes of oil and methane to the oceans every year, accompanied by the formation of asphalt volcanoes on the sea floor. The discovery of seven asphalt volcanoes off the coast of southern California may help to explain high methane emissions recorded during the late Pleistocene.

    • David L. Valentine
    • , Christopher M. Reddy
    •  & Morgan Soloway

  • News & Views |

    The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at the end of the last glacial period has been attributed to a release of carbon from the abyssal ocean. Radiocarbon analyses from the Chilean margin have failed to find evidence that supports this hypothesis.

    • Lowell Stott

  • News & Views |

    In the North Atlantic region, six massive iceberg discharge events marked the last glacial period. A numerical model now links these events to ocean temperatures and ice-shelf conditions.

    • Christina Hulbe

  • Letter |

    Several periods of global ocean anoxia punctuated the Cretaceous period. Marine-sediment chemistry indicates that extensive volcanism at the beginning of Oceanic Anoxic Event 2 released sulphur to the oceans, triggering a biogeochemical cascade that led to enhanced surface productivity and depletion of oxygen in the underlying waters.

    • Derek D. Adams
    • , Matthew T. Hurtgen
    •  & Bradley B. Sageman

  • Letter |

    The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum has been attributed to the release of carbon dioxide from the deep Southern Ocean. However, reconstructions of the radiocarbon signature of Chilean margin intermediate waters during the glacial termination do not reflect the influence of such a release.

    • Ricardo De Pol-Holz
    • , Lloyd Keigwin
    •  & Mahyar Mohtadi

  • Letter |

    The last glacial period was punctuated by several periods of massive iceberg discharge from the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets. Numerical simulations indicate that these discharge events are linked to an interplay between ice-sheet accumulation, marine ice-shelf stability and periodically oscillating surface ocean temperature.

    • Jorge Alvarez-Solas
    • , Sylvie Charbit
    •  & Christophe Dumas

  • Letter |

    The atmospheric response to millennial-scale circulation changes in the North Atlantic Ocean during the last glacial period has been difficult to constrain. Cave deposits from southwestern North America reveal that atmospheric moisture in this region increased in response to slowdowns of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.

    • J. D. M. Wagner
    • , J. E. Cole
    •  & H. R. Barnett

  • News & Views |

    The effect of rising greenhouse-gas emissions on climate is not uniform across the globe. An analysis of the mechanisms behind model-projected changes in ocean temperature gives greater confidence in the pattern of tropical warming and its potential impacts.

    • Amy C. Clement
    • , Andrew C. Baker
    •  & Julie Leloup

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