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Deglacial floods in the Beaufort Sea preceded Younger Dryas cooling

Nature Geoscience volume 11, pages 599–604 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

A period of cooling about 13,000 years ago interrupted about 2,000 years of deglacial warming. Known as the Younger Dryas (YD), the event is thought to have resulted from a slowdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation in response to a sudden flood of Laurentide Ice Sheet meltwater that reached the Nordic Seas. Oxygen isotope evidence for a local source of meltwater to the open western North Atlantic from the Gulf of St Lawrence has been lacking. Here we report that the eastern Beaufort Sea contains the long-sought signal of 18O-depleted water. Beginning at ~12.94 ± 0.15 thousand years ago, oxygen isotopes in the planktonic foraminifera from two sediment cores as well as sediment and seismic data indicate a flood of meltwater, ice and sediment to the Arctic via the Mackenzie River that lasted about 700 years. The minimum in the oxygen isotope ratios lasted ~130 years. We suggest that the floodwater travelled north along the Canadian Archipelago and then through the Fram Strait to the Nordic Seas, where freshening and freezing near sites of deep-water formation would have suppressed convection and caused the YD cooling by reducing the meridional overturning.

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Fig. 1: Overview of core locations and stratigraphy in the eastern Beaufort Sea.
Fig. 2: Proxy data from JPC-15/27 in the eastern Beaufort Sea.
Fig. 3: Grain size variability down composite JPC-15/27.
Fig. 4: Radiocarbon basis for the age model in this paper.
Fig. 5: Comparison of deglacial δ18O between Orca Basin in the Gulf of Mexico and Beaufort Sea.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the officers and crew of USCGC Healy for making this project a success. We are also indebted to M. Carman for help processing core samples, A. McNichol for helpful discussions of 14C in the Arctic, A. Gagnon for the stable isotope measurements, the NOSAMS staff for providing 14C data and M. McCarthy, C. Moser, C. Griner and C. Mayo for leading the coring effort. S. Nielsen helped with translation of Hartz and Milthers14. The manuscript benefited from help from M. Blaauw and B. Keigwin with the Bayesian age model. This research was funded by NSF grants ARC 1204045 to L.D.K. and ARC 1203944 to N.W.D.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA

    L. D. Keigwin, N. Zhao & L. Giosan

  2. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    S. Klotsko & N. W. Driscoll

  3. College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    B. Reilly

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  1. L. D. Keigwin
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Contributions

L.D.K. and N.W.D. conceived the project, N.W.D. and S.K surveyed the seafloor, identified coring locations and studied grain size; B.R. conducted the magnetic measurements; N.Z. and L.G. conducted the XRF scanning; and N.Z. helped develop the chronology. All the authors helped write the manuscript.

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Correspondence to L. D. Keigwin.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary information

Supplementary Dataset 1

AMS dates and chronology

Supplementary Dataset 2

Stable isotope data

Supplementary Dataset 3

The δ18O minimum

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Keigwin, L.D., Klotsko, S., Zhao, N. et al. Deglacial floods in the Beaufort Sea preceded Younger Dryas cooling. Nature Geosci 11, 599–604 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-018-0169-6

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