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Climate change

Southern see-saw seen

Nature volume 457, pages 1093–1094 (2009)Cite this article

The bipolar see-saw hypothesis provides an explanation for why temperature shifts in the two hemispheres were out of phase at certain times. The hypothesis has now passed a test of one of its predictions.

Abrupt climate changes during the last glacial period, about 110,000 to 10,000 years ago, have been widely documented in the Northern Hemisphere. But their underlying cause remains enigmatic. The most widely suspected culprit is the 'conveyor' circulation in the Atlantic Ocean, known to be capable of abruptly switching on and causing rapid warming of the European climate1. A clue comes from Antarctic temperature histories that show a roughly opposite pattern: when Europe warms abruptly, the south begins a gradual cooling2. This trading of hot and cold between the hemispheres has been called the bipolar see-saw3, and it further implicates the Atlantic conveyor circulation because that circulation is known to orchestrate the redistribution of vast amounts of heat between the hemispheres.

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Figure 1: Possible chain of events during the last deglaciation.

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  1. Jeffrey P. Severinghaus is at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California 92093-0244, USA. jseveringhaus@ucsd.edu ,

    Jeffrey P. Severinghaus

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Severinghaus, J. Southern see-saw seen. Nature 457, 1093–1094 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/4571093a

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