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Abrupt changes in the southern extent of North Atlantic Deep Water during Dansgaard–Oeschger events

Nature Geoscience volume 8, pages 950–954 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

The glacial climate system transitioned rapidly between cold (stadial) and warm (interstadial) conditions in the Northern Hemisphere1. This variability, referred to as Dansgaard–Oeschger variability2, is widely believed to arise from perturbations of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation3,4,5. Evidence for such changes during the longer Heinrich stadials has been identified, but direct evidence for overturning circulation changes during Dansgaard–Oeschger events has proven elusive6. Here we reconstruct bottom water [CO32−] variability from B/Ca ratios of benthic foraminifera and indicators of sedimentary dissolution, and use these reconstructions to infer the flow of northern-sourced deep water to the deep central sub-Antarctic Atlantic Ocean. We find that nearly every Dansgaard–Oeschger interstadial is accompanied by a rapid incursion of North Atlantic Deep Water into the deep South Atlantic. Based on these results and transient climate model simulations7, we conclude that North Atlantic stadial–interstadial climate variability was associated with significant Atlantic overturning circulation changes that were rapidly transmitted across the Atlantic. However, by demonstrating the persistent role of Atlantic overturning circulation changes in past abrupt climate variability, our reconstructions of carbonate chemistry further indicate that the carbon cycle response to abrupt climate change was not a simple function of North Atlantic overturning.

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Figure 1: Atlantic Ocean [CO32−].
Figure 2: High-resolution Greenland and Atlantic climate records.
Figure 3: Model–proxy data comparison.

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Acknowledgements

We are indebted to D. Hodell for his insightful comments. J.G. was funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust. L.C.S. would like to acknowledge NERC grant NE/J010545/1 and the Royal Society. S.M. was supported by ERC grant 2010-NEWLOG ADG-267931 HE. C.W. acknowledges support from the European Research Council grant ACCLIMATE/no 339108. L.M. was supported by the Australian Research Council grant DE150100107. A.T. acknowledges support from the US NSF (grants 1400914, 1341311). Model experiments were performed on a computational cluster owned by the Faculty of Science of the University of New South Wales, Australia. This is LSCE contribution 5353 and IPRC publication number 1131.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Earth Sciences Department, Godwin Laboratory for Palaeoclimate Research, University of Cambridge, Downing Street Cambridge CB2 3EQ, UK,

    Julia Gottschalk, Luke C. Skinner & Sambuddha Misra

  2. LSCE/IPSL, Laboratoire CNRS-CEA-UVSQ, 91198 Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Claire Waelbroeck

  3. Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia

    Laurie Menviel

  4. ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia

    Laurie Menviel

  5. Department of Oceanography, International Pacific Research Center, SOEST, University of Hawaii, 96822 Honolulu, USA

    Axel Timmermann

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Contributions

J.G. and L.C.S. designed the study. C.W. collected the core material. J.G. performed census counts and measured the epibenthic trace element composition under the guidance of S.M. at the University of Cambridge. J.G. and L.C.S. analysed the proxy data. L.M. and A.T. contributed model output data and the interpretation thereof. J.G., L.C.S. and A.T. wrote this manuscript with contributions from all authors.

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Correspondence to Julia Gottschalk.

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Gottschalk, J., Skinner, L., Misra, S. et al. Abrupt changes in the southern extent of North Atlantic Deep Water during Dansgaard–Oeschger events. Nature Geosci 8, 950–954 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2558

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