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Moisture transport across Central America as a positive feedback on abrupt climatic changes

Nature volume 445, pages 908–911 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

Moisture transport from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean across Central America leads to relatively high salinities in the North Atlantic Ocean1 and contributes to the formation of North Atlantic Deep Water2. This deep water formation varied strongly between Dansgaard/Oeschger interstadials and Heinrich events—millennial-scale abrupt warm and cold events, respectively, during the last glacial period3. Increases in the moisture transport across Central America have been proposed to coincide with northerly shifts of the Intertropical Convergence Zone and with Dansgaard/Oeschger interstadials, with opposite changes for Heinrich events4. Here we reconstruct sea surface salinities in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean over the past 90,000 years by comparing palaeotemperature estimates from alkenones and Mg/Ca ratios with foraminiferal oxygen isotope ratios that vary with both temperature and salinity. We detect millennial-scale fluctuations of sea surface salinities in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean of up to two to four practical salinity units. High salinities are associated with the southward migration of the tropical Atlantic Intertropical Convergence Zone, coinciding with Heinrich events and with Greenland stadials5. The amplitudes of these salinity variations are significantly larger on the Pacific side of the Panama isthmus, as inferred from a comparison of our data with a palaeoclimate record from the Caribbean basin6. We conclude that millennial-scale fluctuations of moisture transport constitute an important feedback mechanism for abrupt climate changes, modulating the North Atlantic freshwater budget and hence North Atlantic Deep Water formation.

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Figure 1: Averaged precipitation rates over South America for March and September for the period ad 1987–2003.
Figure 2: Records of MD02-2529 versus age for the last 90 kyr  bp.
Figure 3: Temporal variations of the calculated Δδ 18 O sw of MD02-2529 compared to other palaeoclimatic records.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from INSU and the French Polar Institute IPEV, which provided the RV Marion Dufresne and the CALYPSO coring system used during the IMAGES VIII MONA cruise. Thanks to Y. Garcin and M. Siddall for discussion and reviews. Paleoclimate work at CEREGE is supported by grants from the CNRS, the ANR and the Gary Comer Science and Education Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CEREGE, UMR6635, CNRS Université Paul Cézanne Aix-Marseille III, Collège de France, Europôle de l’Arbois, BP 80, 13545 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 04, France,

    Guillaume Leduc, Laurence Vidal, Kazuyo Tachikawa, Frauke Rostek, Corinne Sonzogni, Luc Beaufort & Edouard Bard

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  1. Guillaume Leduc
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Correspondence to Guillaume Leduc or Edouard Bard.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Discussion about present-day climatotlogy and hydrology, Supplementary Methods concerning Analytical procedures and Age control, Supplementary Figures 1-5 with legendsand Supplementary Tables 1-2 containing results of core MD02-2529 and radiocarbon data used to construct the age model. This file also contains additional references. (PDF 15246 kb)

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Leduc, G., Vidal, L., Tachikawa, K. et al. Moisture transport across Central America as a positive feedback on abrupt climatic changes. Nature 445, 908–911 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05578

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