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Reply to: No freshwater-filled glacial Arctic Ocean

Nature volume 602, pages E4–E6 (2022)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 02 February 2022

replying to R. F. Spielhagen et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04089-8 (2021)

In the accompanying Comment1, Spielhagen et al. respond to our recent Article2, raising several issues concerning the perceived impossibility of a glacial freshwater ocean, focusing on the Nordic Seas and the North Atlantic south of the Greenland–Scotland ridge (GSR). They argue that no basin-wide 230Thex minima were seen in the Nordic Seas at the times proposed, and that they were due to dilution by high mass fluxes; that 10Be records closely resemble those of 230Thex, which they assume to support only the dilution hypothesis; that the reportedly continuous foraminiferal δ18O records were incompatible with freshwater under an ice shelf north of the GSR; and that no corresponding meltwater signal was seen in North Atlantic foraminiferal δ18O records south of the GSR. We highlight the circular arguments that result from the reliance on just one overstretched proxy for constraining age, temperature and salinity. Our interpretation is in line with observations and with the rapid melting during glacial terminations.

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Fig. 1: 230Thex data for four cores from the Nordic Seas.
Fig. 2: δ18O in diatoms versus δ18O in foraminifera.

Data availability

All data shown here have been published previously and are fully referenced.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany

    Walter Geibert, Jens Matthiessen, Jutta Wollenburg & Ruediger Stein

  2. MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences and Faculty of Geosciences, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Ruediger Stein

Authors
  1. Walter Geibert
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  2. Jens Matthiessen
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  3. Jutta Wollenburg
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  4. Ruediger Stein
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Contributions

W.G. wrote this reply based on published data. All authors contributed to interpretion of data, selection of references and writing of the text. I. Stimac, who was an author of the original article, was not involved in this reply because her contribution to the original article (methods and results sections of the paper) was not discussed as part of the comment. She still supports the published article.

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Correspondence to Walter Geibert.

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Supplementary Information

This file contains the Supplementary Discussions, Fig. 1 and refs. 1–17.

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Geibert, W., Matthiessen, J., Wollenburg, J. et al. Reply to: No freshwater-filled glacial Arctic Ocean. Nature 602, E4–E6 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04090-1

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