Abstract
Pleistocene glacial–interglacial cycles are hypothesized to be modulated by Earth’s orbital parameters through their influence on the Northern Hemisphere summer insolation. Changes in obliquity—Earth’s axial tilt—can explain the 41,000-year glacial cycles in the Early Pleistocene. However, the absence of 19,000- and 23,000-year frequencies corresponding to Earth’s precession of the rotation axis from those cycles remains enigmatic. Here we investigate how these orbital forcings may have changed by developing an insolation proxy based on the oxygen-to-nitrogen ratio of gases trapped in ice core samples collected from the Allan Hills Blue Ice Area in East Antarctica. We find that East Antarctic temperature was positively correlated with local, Southern Hemisphere summer insolation in the Early Pleistocene, while this correlation became negative in the late Pleistocene, with only the latter being consistent with the previous findings that Northern Hemisphere insolation paced Antarctic climate. If Early Pleistocene ice volume and local Antarctic temperature co-varied, our result supports the hypothesis that attributes the absence of precession in the 41,000-year glacial cycles to cancellation of precession frequencies in hemispheric ice volume changes that are responding to local insolation, suggesting a more dynamic East Antarctic Ice Sheet in the Early Pleistocene than in the past 800,000 years.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$29.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$259.00 per year
only $21.58 per issue
Rent or buy this article
Prices vary by article type
from$1.95
to$39.95
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
All data supporting the conclusion of this paper are publicly available without restriction. Dome Fuji, Dome C and Vostok data are from data depositories associated with their respective publications. Allan Hills gas ratio and stable water isotope data are available at the US Antarctic Program Data Center: https://doi.org/10.15784/601483 (ALHIC1502 and ALHIC1503 O2/N2/Ar elemental and isotopic ratios), https://doi.org/10.15784/601129 (ALHIC1502 stable water isotopes), https://doi.org/10.15784/601128 (ALHIC1503 stable water isotopes), https://doi.org/10.15784/601512 (S27 δO2/N2 and δAr/N2 ratios) and https://doi.org/10.7265/N5NP22DF (S27 stable water isotope records). We compiled those δO2/N2 and δAr/N2 data here as Supplementary Data 1 and 2, respectively. Source data for Figs. 3 and 4, and Extended Data Figure 5 are provided with this paper.
Code availability
MATLAB codes for the Monte Carlo simulation performed in this study are available at GitHub: https://github.com/yuzheny/MonteCarlo_correlation.
References
Imbrie, J. et al. On the structure and origin of major glaciation cycles 1. linear responses to Milankovitch forcing. Paleoceanography 7, 701–738 (1992).
Lisiecki, L. E. & Raymo, M. E. A Pliocene–Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic δ18O records. Paleoceanography 20, PA1003 (2005).
Hays, J. D., Imbrie, J. & Shackleton, N. J. Variations in the Earth’s orbit: pacemaker of the ice ages: for 500,000 years, major climatic changes have followed variations in obliquity and precession. Science 194, 1121–1132 (1976).
Berends, C. J., Köhler, P., Lourens, L. J. & van de Wal, R. S. W. On the cause of the mid‐Pleistocene transition. Rev. Geophys. 59, e2020RG000727 (2021).
Raymo, M. E. & Huybers, P. Unlocking the mysteries of the ice ages. Nature 451, 284–285 (2008).
Huybers, P. Early Pleistocene glacial cycles and the integrated summer insolation forcing. Science 313, 508–511 (2006).
Huybers, P. & Tziperman, E. Integrated summer insolation forcing and 40,000‐year glacial cycles: the perspective from an ice‐sheet/energy‐balance model. Paleoceanography 23, PA1208 (2008).
Raymo, M. E., Lisiecki, L. E. & Nisancioglu, K. H. Plio–Pleistocene ice volume, Antarctic climate, and the global δ18O record. Science 313, 492–495 (2006).
Morée, A. L. et al. Cancellation of the precessional cycle in δ18O records during the Early Pleistocene. Geophys. Res. Lett. 48, e2020GL090035 (2021).
McKay, R. et al. Pleistocene variability of Antarctic Ice Sheet extent in the Ross Embayment. Quat. Sci. Rev. 34, 93–112 (2012).
Scherer, R. P. et al. Antarctic records of precession-paced insolation-driven warming during early Pleistocene Marine Isotope Stage 31. Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L03505 (2008).
Patterson, M. O. et al. Orbital forcing of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet during the Pliocene and Early Pleistocene. Nat. Geosci. 7, 841–847 (2014).
Reilly, B. T. et al. New magnetostratigraphic insights from iceberg alley on the rhythms of Antarctic climate during the Plio–Pleistocene. Paleoceanogr. Paleoclimatol. 36, e2020PA003994 (2021).
Petit, J. R. et al. Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature 399, 429–436 (1999).
Jouzel, J. et al. Orbital and millennial Antarctic climate variability over the past 800,000 years. Science 317, 793–796 (2007).
Kawamura, K. et al. Northern Hemisphere forcing of climatic cycles in Antarctica over the past 360,000 years. Nature 448, 912–916 (2007).
Suwa, M. & Bender, M. L. Chronology of the Vostok ice core constrained by O2/N2 ratios of occluded air, and its implication for the Vostok climate records. Quat. Sci. Rev. 27, 1093–1106 (2008).
Bazin, L. et al. Phase relationships between orbital forcing and the composition of air trapped in Antarctic ice cores. Clim. Past 12, 729–748 (2016).
Huybers, P. & Denton, G. Antarctic temperature at orbital timescales controlled by local summer duration. Nat. Geosci. 1, 787–792 (2008).
Yan, Y. et al. Two-million-year-old snapshots of atmospheric gases from Antarctic ice. Nature 574, 663–666 (2019).
Spaulding, N. E. et al. Ice motion and mass balance at the Allan Hills Blue-Ice Area, Antarctica, with implications for paleoclimate reconstructions. J. Glaciol. 58, 399–406 (2012).
Kehrl, L. et al. Evaluating the duration and continuity of potential climate records from the Allan Hills Blue Ice Area, East Antarctica. Geophys. Res. Lett. 45, 4096–4104 (2018).
Bender, M. L., Barnett, B., Dreyfus, G., Jouzel, J. & Porcelli, D. The contemporary degassing rate of 40Ar from the solid Earth. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 8232–8237 (2008).
Higgins, J. A. et al. Atmospheric composition 1 million years ago from blue ice in the Allan Hills, Antarctica. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 112, 6887–6891 (2015).
Landais, A. et al. Towards orbital dating of the EPICA Dome C ice core using δO2/N2. Clim. Past 8, 191–203 (2012).
Extier, T. et al. On the use of δ18Oatm for ice core dating. Quat. Sci. Rev. 185, 244–257 (2018).
Haeberli, M. et al. Snapshots of mean ocean temperature over the last 700,000 years using noble gases in the EPICA Dome C ice core. Clim. Past 17, 843–867 (2021).
Oyabu, I. et al. Fractionation of O2/N2 and Ar/N2 in the Antarctic ice sheet during bubble formation and bubble–clathrate hydrate transition from precise gas measurements of the Dome Fuji ice core. Cryosphere 15, 5529–5555 (2021).
Bender, M. L. Orbital tuning chronology for the Vostok climate record supported by trapped gas composition. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 204, 275–289 (2002).
Yan, Y. et al. Enhanced moisture delivery into Victoria Land, East Antarctica during the early last interglacial: implications for West Antarctic Ice Sheet stability. Clim. Past 17, 1841–1855 (2021).
Yan, Y., Brook, E. J., Kurbatov, A. V., Severinghaus, J. P. & Higgins, J. A. Ice core evidence for atmospheric oxygen decline since the Mid-Pleistocene transition. Sci. Adv. 7, eabj9341 (2021).
Craig, H., Horibe, Y. & Sowers, T. Gravitational separation of gases and isotopes in polar ice caps. Science 242, 1675–1678 (1988).
Stolper, D. A., Bender, M. L., Dreyfus, G. B., Yan, Y. & Higgins, J. A. A Pleistocene ice core record of atmospheric O2 concentrations. Science 353, 1427–1430 (2016).
Keeling, R. F. & Graven, H. D. Insights from time series of atmospheric carbon dioxide and related tracers. Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 46, 85–110 (2021).
Fujita, S., Okuyama, J., Hori, A. & Hondoh, T. Metamorphism of stratified firn at Dome Fuji, Antarctica: a mechanism for local insolation modulation of gas transport conditions during bubble close off. J. Geophys. Res. Earth Surf. 114, F03023 (2009).
Dansgaard, W. Stable isotopes in precipitation. Tellus 16, 436–468 (1964).
Kavanaugh, J. L. & Cuffey, K. M. Generalized view of source-region effects on δD and deuterium excess of ice-sheet precipitation. Ann. Glaciol. 35, 111–117 (2002).
Holloway, M. D. et al. Antarctic last interglacial isotope peak in response to sea ice retreat not ice-sheet collapse. Nat. Commun. 7, 12293 (2016).
Uemura, R. et al. Asynchrony between Antarctic temperature and CO2 associated with obliquity over the past 720,000 years. Nat. Commun. 9, 961 (2018).
Kobashi, T. et al. Post-bubble close-off fractionation of gases in polar firn and ice cores: effects of accumulation rate on permeation through overloading pressure. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 15, 13895–13914 (2015).
Bereiter, B., Fischer, H., Schwander, J. & Stocker, T. F. Diffusive equilibration of N2, O2 and CO2 mixing ratios in a 1.5-million-years-old ice core. Cryosphere 8, 245–256 (2014).
Spaulding, N. E. et al. Climate archives from 90 to 250 ka in horizontal and vertical ice cores from the Allan Hills Blue Ice Area, Antarctica. Quat. Res. 80, 562–574 (2013).
Francke, A. et al. Multivariate statistic and time series analyses of grain-size data in Quaternary sediments of Lake El’gygytgyn, NE Russia. Clim. Past 9, 2459–2470 (2013).
Shakun, J. D., Raymo, M. E. & Lea, D. W. An Early Pleistocene Mg/Ca‐δ18O record from the Gulf of Mexico: evaluating ice sheet size and pacing in the 41‐kyr world. Paleoceanography 31, 1011–1027 (2016).
Barker, S. et al. Persistent influence of precession on northern ice sheet variability since the early Pleistocene. Science 376, 961–967 (2022).
Elderfield, H. et al. Evolution of ocean temperature and ice volume through the mid-Pleistocene climate transition. Science 337, 704–709 (2012).
Laskar, J. et al. A long-term numerical solution for the insolation quantities of the Earth. Astron. Astrophys. 428, 261–285 (2004).
Dadic, R., Schneebeli, M., Bertler, N. A. N., Schwikowski, M. & Matzl, M. Extreme snow metamorphism in the Allan Hills, Antarctica, as an analogue for glacial conditions with implications for stable isotope composition. J. Glaciol. 61, 1171–1182 (2015).
Whillans, I. M. & Cassidy, W. A. Catch a falling star: meteorites and old ice. Science 222, 55–57 (1983).
Delisle, G. & Sievers, J. Sub-ice topography and meteorite finds near the Allan Hills and the near Western Ice Field, Victoria Land, Antarctica. J. Geophys. Res. Planets 96, 15577–15587 (1991).
Landais, A. et al. Interglacial Antarctic–Southern Ocean climate decoupling due to moisture source area shifts. Nat. Geosci. 14, 918–923 (2021).
Dreyfus, G. B. et al. Anomalous flow below 2,700 m in the EPICA Dome C ice core detected using δ18O of atmospheric oxygen measurements. Clim. Past 3, 341–353 (2007).
Ikeda, T. et al. Extreme fractionation of gases caused by formation of clathrate hydrates in Vostok Antarctic ice. Geophys. Res. Lett. 26, 91–94 (1999).
Ikeda-Fukazawa, T., Hondoh, T., Fukumura, T., Fukazawa, H. & Mae, S. Variation in N2/O2 ratio of occluded air in Dome Fuji Antarctic ice. J. Geophys. Res. Atmospheres 106, 17799–17810 (2001).
Huber, C. & Leuenberger, M. Measurements of isotope and elemental ratios of air from polar ice with a new on-line extraction method. Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst. 5, Q10002 (2004).
Dreyfus, G. B. Dating an 800,000 Year Antarctic Ice Core Record Using the Isotopic Composition of Trapped Air. Ph.D thesis, Princeton Univ. (2008).
Lüthi, D. et al. CO2 and O2/N2 variations in and just below the bubble–clathrate transformation zone of Antarctic ice cores. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 297, 226–233 (2010).
Shackleton, S. et al. Is the noble gas-based rate of ocean warming during the Younger Dryas overestimated? Geophys. Res. Lett. 46, 5928–5936 (2019).
Oyabu, I. et al. New technique for high-precision, simultaneous measurements of CH4, N2O and CO2 concentrations; isotopic and elemental ratios of N2, O2 and Ar; and total air content in ice cores by wet extraction. Atmos. Meas. Tech. 13, 6703–6731 (2020).
Kawamura, K. Variations of Atmospheric Components Over the Past 340,000 Years From Dome Fuji Deep Ice Core, Antarctica. Ph.D thesis, Tohoku Univ. (2001).
Häberli, M. Noble Gas Ratios in Polar Ice Cores: A New Proxy to Infer the Mean Ocean Temperature Over the Last 700 ka. Ph.D thesis, Universität Bern. (2019).
Acknowledgements
Funding for this work was provided by US National Science Foundation with the following grant numbers: ANT-1443263 (J.A.H.) and ANT-1443306 (A.V.K and P.A.M.). We thank the US Ice Drilling Design and Operations (IDDO), M. Waszkiewicz, P. Kemeny, S. Mackay and K. Borek Air for assistance with the field work. We also thank R. Nunn and G. Hargreaves at the National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility for help with ice core sample processing and archiving. We thank M. Bender for the constructive comments and discussions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Conceptualization: Y.Y. Methodology: J.A.H. and Y.Y. for gas ratios and A.V.K. and P.A.M. for stable water isotopes. Investigation: Y.Y. Visualization: Y.Y. Supervision: J.A.H., A.V.K. and P.A.M. Writing, original draft: Y.Y. Writing, review and editing: S.S., A.V.K., P.A.M. and J.A.H.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Peer review
Peer review information
Nature Geoscience and the authors thank Ryu Uemura, Frederic Parrenin and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor(s): James Super, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Extended data
Extended Data Fig. 1 Covariation between δO2/N2 and δAr/N2.
a, Dome Fuji (clathrate N = 219, r2 = 0.52; bubble N = 238, r2 = 0.82); b, Dome C (clathrate N = 40, r2 = 0.68; bubble N = 29, r2 = 0.66); c, S27 (N = 24; r2 = 0.38; and d, discontinuous Allan Hills ice (N = 92; r2 = 0.68). Correlation in all samples regardless of gas preservation status are significant at p = 0.05 level (two-tailed). Part of this covariation is modulated by insolation. Clathrate- and bubble-based gas data are shown in black and red circles, respectively. Dashed lines represent 95% confidence interval of the slope. All of the Allan Hills samples only contain bubbles.
Extended Data Fig. 2 Insolation imprint in δAr/N2 ratios of the air trapped in ice containing (a) bubbles and (b) clathrates only.
The concept here is similar to Fig. 1 in the main text, with Dome Fuji (red)28, Dome C (blue)27, and Allan Hills S27 (gray)30 datasets. Clathrate-based δAr/N2 is negatively correlated with local Dec 21st insolation intensity in both Dome Fuji (sample N = 219, r2 = 0.24, two-tailed p < 0.01) and Dome C ice (N = 40, r2 = 0.21, p < 0.01). There is also a significant (two-tailed p < 0.05) correlation between bubble-based δAr/N2 and insolation in Dome Fuji (N = 238, r2 = 0.24), Dome C (N = 29, r2 = 0.20), and S27 (N = 24, r2 = 0.23) ice. Dashed lines represent 95% confidence interval of the slope. Note that the number of available δAr/N2 data points is smaller than the number of δO2/N2 data, because not all δO2/N2-reporting studies include δAr/N2.
Extended Data Fig. 3 S27 δO2/N2 data measured from ice above 140 m reported by Spaulding et al.42 (black circles) and Yan et al.30 (red circles) superimposed on the insolation at local (77 S) summer solstice.
Error bars represent the pooled standard error of the δO2/N2 measurements reported by Spaulding et al.42 (black; ± 2.99 ‰; unique sample number N = 38) and Yan et al.30 (red; ± 2.69 ‰; unique sample number N = 45). Each unique samples have two replicates with the mean value reported. Note that the y-axis for insolation is reversed. The two shallowest δO2/N2 in Yan et al.30 (marked by arrows) are not included in this study in view of suspected intrusion of modern air.
Extended Data Fig. 4 Correlation between the isotopic composition of ice (δDice) and δO2/N2 of the trapped air in the Allan Hills blue ice dating back to 1.5 Ma.
Error bars represent the pooled standard error of the δO2/N2 measurements (± 2.38 ‰). Dashed lines represent 95% confidence interval of the slope [–0.71 ± 0.37 (1σ)] of the linear regression. The correlation is not statistically significant at 95% significance level (N = 25; r2 = 0.15; two-tailed p = 0.06).
Extended Data Fig. 5 Relationship of δDice and δAr/N2 of the trapped air in the Allan Hills ice and the robustness given analytical uncertainties.
Panels (a-c) are conceptually very similar to Fig. 2 in the main text, but here δAr/N2 provides additional evidence to the observed negative correlation between δDice and δO2/N2 in samples dating back to 1.5 and 2.0 Ma. Error bars represent the pooled standard error of the δAr/N2 measurements (± 1.47 ‰). Dashed lines represent 95% confidence interval. δAr/N2 is only significantly (two-tailed p < 0.05) correlated in the 1.5 and 2.0 Ma samples (sample N = 29, r2 = 0.28), and not significantly correlated in the 810 ka (N = 34, r2 = 0.07) or the 400 ka samples (N = 29, r2 = 0.10). However, the 95th percentile of r value between the 29 δAr/N2 and δDice data pairs dating back to 1.5 and 2.0 Ma is –0.272 in a 106-iteration Monte Carlo simulation (panel d). Given the sample size (N = 29), the critical r value at 0.05 significance level (one-tailed) is –0.311 (dashed vertical line), meaning that there is a greater than 5% chance that the analytical uncertainties in δAr/N2 lead to insignificant correlation. The negative δAr/N2-δDice relationship is thus not considered robust. Histogram bin size is 0.01.
Extended Data Fig. 6 Relationship between δO2/N2 and δDice measured from the same depth in (a) Dome Fuji16,28,39, (b) Dome C18,25,26,27,51, (c) Vostok14,29, and (d) Allan Hills S27 ice.
Only clathrate-based data from Dome Fuji, Dome C, and Vostok are used in this comparison, shown as black circles. A statistically significant (two-tailed p < 0.01) positive correlation exists in Dome Fuji (N = 366, r2 = 0.04), Dome C (N = 365, r2 = 0.05), and Vostok (N = 151, r2 = 0.16) data. Red circles in S27 indicate that gas ratio data were measured on ice samples containing bubbles because the Allan Hills S27 ice has no clathrate. The correlation is still positive and significant (N = 24, r2 = 0.27, p = 0.01). Dashed lines represent 95% confidence interval. The results show that, for 4 Antarctic ice cores, there is strong evidence for Antarctic temperature in phase with northern hemisphere insolation on orbital timescales.
Extended Data Fig. 7 Distribution of δO2/N2 measured in Allan Hills ice core samples.
Because the range of the data in late- and early-Pleistocene samples is similar, the observed negative correlation between δO2/N2 and δDice in 1.5 and 2.0 Ma ice samples is unlikely to be the result of ice samples covering an obliquity-dominant insolation cycle. Histogram bin size is 1‰.
Supplementary information
Supplementary information
Supplementary Text and Figs. 1–3.
Supplementary Data 1 and 2
Supplementary Data 1: Oxygen-to-nitrogen ratios (δO2/N2) measured in gases trapped in ice cores that are used in this study. Supplementary Data 2: Argon-to-nitrogen ratios (δAr/N2) measured in gases trapped in ice cores that are used in this study (also included within the workbook).
Source data
Source Data Fig. 3
Statistical source data: correlation coefficients of 29 stable water isotopes and gas ratios from 106 Monte Carlo iterations.
Source Data Fig. 4
Statistical source data: correlation coefficients of 29 randomly picked 65° N integrated summer insolation versus 77° S 21 December insolation from 106 Monte Carlo iterations.
Source Data Extended Data Fig. 5
Statistical source data: correlation coefficients of 29 stable water isotopes and gas ratios from 106 Monte Carlo simulations with analytical uncertainties included in each iteration.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Yan, Y., Kurbatov, A.V., Mayewski, P.A. et al. Early Pleistocene East Antarctic temperature in phase with local insolation. Nat. Geosci. 16, 50–55 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-01095-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-01095-x