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Reply to: Black carbon attribution

Nature volume 612, pages E20–E21 (2022)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 21 December 2022

replying to R. M. Newnham Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05518-y (2022)

We appreciate the remarks in the accompanying Comment1 regarding our interpretation of the fallout of biomass burning over Antarctica during the past two millennia. Our previous study2 was based on precise measurements of an unambiguous combustion indicator—refractory black carbon3—in a broad array of Antarctic ice cores, as well as extensive atmospheric modelling. For many reasons, however, we do not find Newnham’s evidence or arguments1 sufficient to alter our conclusions. In our previous study2, we proposed that (1) large increases in biomass-burning emissions poleward of 40° S, which were documented in the Antarctic ice cores starting around ad 1300, largely resulted from the introduction of fire to New Zealand by early Polynesian settlers; (2) climate-modulated emissions from Patagonia and Tasmania generally declined after about ad 1400 as a result of overall wetter conditions, which were caused by widely recognized changes in the Southern Annual Mode4; and (3) anthropogenic burning emissions from New Zealand dwarfed earlier emissions from these three regions (not from the mid-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere as a whole, as incorrectly summarized by Newnham1).

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Hydrologic Sciences, Desert Research Institute, Reno, NV, USA

    Joseph R. McConnell & Nathan J. Chellman

  2. Department of Meteorology and Geophysics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Andreas Stohl

Authors
  1. Joseph R. McConnell
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  2. Nathan J. Chellman
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  3. Andreas Stohl
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Contributions

J.R.M. led the writing of the paper, with contributions from N.J.C. and A.S. To expedite this Reply, the research and writing were performed by a subset of the original authors who had particularly relevant expertise, and therefore many of the original authors have been not been included in this paper.

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Correspondence to Joseph R. McConnell.

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McConnell, J.R., Chellman, N.J. & Stohl, A. Reply to: Black carbon attribution. Nature 612, E20–E21 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05519-x

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