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Salty seas sway global glacial cycles

Analysis of microfossils in marine sediments spanning the past 1.2 million years suggests that increased intrusion of highly saline waters from the Indian Ocean into the South Atlantic propelled Earth’s deglaciations during this period.
  1. Kaustubh Thirumalai

    1. Kaustubh Thirumalai is in the Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA.

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Earth’s climate fluctuated remarkably over the past one million years, yo-yoing between long-lived ice ages, called glacials, and brief periods of relative warmth known as interglacials. Each maximum in global ice volume was reached several tens of thousands of years after the initial onset of glacial conditions, but transitions into interglacial periods, termed deglaciations, involved rapid global warming and were generally complete within fifteen thousand years or so1,2. Delineating the precise order of ocean and atmospheric mechanisms associated with this sawtooth-like pattern of glaciation and deglaciation has remained an outstanding problem in Earth science. Writing in Nature, Nuber et al.3 suggest that intrusions of highly saline waters from the Indian Ocean into the less salty Atlantic Ocean provided the necessary pushes to deglaciate the planet during the past 1.2 million years.

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Nature 617, 258-259 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01489-w

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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