Sediment study finds the pulse of tropical glaciers

Putnam, Aaron E.

doi:10.1038/d41586-022-01841-6

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13 July 2022

Sediment study finds the pulse of tropical glaciers

In regions of the globe at middle and high latitudes, glacial periods have waxed and waned for hundreds of millennia. Glacier-derived sediment in a Peruvian lake suggests that tropical glaciers have moved to a similar beat.

Aaron E. Putnam⁰

Aaron E. Putnam
1. Aaron E. Putnam is in the School of Earth and Climate Sciences and Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, Orono, Maine 04469, USA.
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At the peak of the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago, vast ice sheets covered northern portions of continents in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, and glaciers extended from mid-latitude mountain chains in both hemispheres¹. These regions were simultaneously locked into a climate marked by cold temperatures and advancing glaciers, yet Earth’s orbital history suggests that summers should have been warm in the Southern Hemisphere and cool in the Northern Hemisphere¹. Since this conundrum emerged several decades ago, scientists have grappled with its implications, and its relationship with the origins of glacial cycles, which had varied regularly for hundreds of thousands of years. What caused synchronized bipolar ice-age cooling? And did glaciers in the tropics vary with the same rhythm as did those at higher latitudes? Writing in Nature, Rodbell and colleagues² show that the timing of glacial variations in the tropical Andes is strikingly similar to that at higher latitudes over a period of nearly 700,000 years.

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Nature 607, 241-243 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01841-6

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