Abstract
The factors driving glacial changes in ocean overturning circulation are not well understood. On the basis of a comparison of 20 climate variables over the past four glacial cycles, the SPECMAP project1 proposed that summer insolation at high northern latitudes (that is, Milankovitch forcing) drives the same sequence of ocean circulation and other climate responses over 100-kyr eccentricity cycles, 41-kyr obliquity cycles and 23-kyr precession cycles. SPECMAP analysed the circulation response at only a few sites in the Atlantic Ocean, however, and the phase of circulation response has been shown to vary by site and orbital band2. Here we test the SPECMAP hypothesis by measuring the phase of orbital responses in benthic δ13C (a proxy indicator of ocean nutrient content) at 24 sites throughout the Atlantic over the past 425 kyr. On the basis of δ13C responses at 3,000–4,010 m water depth, we find that maxima in Milankovitch forcing are associated with greater mid-depth overturning in the obliquity band but less overturning in the precession band. This suggests that Atlantic overturning is strongly sensitive to factors beyond ice volume and summer insolation at high northern latitudes. A better understanding of these processes could lead to improvements in model estimates of overturning rates, which range from a 40 per cent increase to a 40 per cent decrease at the Last Glacial Maximum3 and a 10–50 per cent decrease over the next 140 yr in response to projected increases in atmospheric CO2 (ref. 4).
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Acknowledgements
We thank T. Herbert, D. Oppo, Z. Liu, P. Huybers, A. Carlson and L. Robinson for discussions. L.E.L. was supported by the NOAA Postdoctoral Program in Climate and Global Change, administered by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. M.E.R. and W.B.C. acknowledge the support of NSF grants.
Author Contributions L.E.L. designed the study, performed the spectral analysis, and wrote the paper in consultation with M.E.R. and W.B.C.; contributed unpublished data from ODP Sites 926 and 928.
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This file contains a Supplementary Discussion, Supplementary References Supplementary Tables 1-2 and Supplementary Figures 1-7 with Legends. (PDF 451 kb)
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Lisiecki, L., Raymo, M. & Curry, W. Atlantic overturning responses to Late Pleistocene climate forcings. Nature 456, 85–88 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07425
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07425
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