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Regional climate control of glaciers in New Zealand and Europe during the pre-industrial Holocene

Abstract

Mountain glaciers worldwide have undergone net recession over the past century in response to atmospheric warming1, but the extent to which this warming reflects natural versus anthropogenic climate change remains uncertain2,3. Between about 11,500 years ago and the nineteenth century, progressive atmospheric cooling over the European Alps induced glacier expansion2,4,5,6, culminating with several large-scale advances during the seventeen to nineteenth centuries3. However, it is unclear whether this glacier behaviour reflects global or a more regional forcing. Here we reconstruct glacier fluctuations in the Southern Alps of New Zealand for the past 11,000 years using 10Be exposure ages. We use those fluctuations to estimate the associated temperature variations. On orbital to submillennial timescales, changes in glacier snowlines in New Zealand were linked to regional climate and oceanographic variability and were asynchronous with snowline variations in European glaciers. We attribute this asynchrony to the migration of the intertropical convergence zone. In light of this persistent asynchrony, we suggest that the net glacier recession and atmospheric warming in both regions over the past century is anomalous in the context of earlier Holocene variability and corresponds with anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.

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Figure 1: Map of the southwest Pacific region.
Figure 2: Glacial geomorphologic map of the Cameron Glacier valley, Southern Alps, New Zealand.
Figure 3: Glacier-inferred temperature records compared with proxies for the position of the ITCZ.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Gary C. Comer Science and Education Foundation, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation (NSF) for support. J.M.S. acknowledges NSF support for this study (grants EAR-0823521 and EAR-0345835). GNS Science’s Direct Crown Funded Programme ‘Global Change through Time’ supported D.J.A.B. We thank the staff of the Center for Accelerator and Mass Spectrometry at Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratory for their careful work and C. J. Burrows, W. S. Broecker, U. Ninnemann, M. R. Kaplan, R. F. Anderson, D. M. Sigman, K. A. Allen and G. R. M. Bromley for discussions. K. A. Allen helped with statistics. B. Lee and D. Perro provided administrative support. Mount Hutt Helicopters provided transportation to and from field sites. P. and A. Todhunter of Lake Heron Station graciously permitted us access to the Cameron valley. We thank the Department of Conservation—Te Papa Atawhai and Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu for access onto and sampling of the Cameron Glacier moraines. This paper is LDEO contribution no. 7572.

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Contributions

A.E.P. helped design the project, conducted field work and laboratory analyses, conducted snowline reconstructions and wrote the paper. J.M.S. and G.H.D. helped design the project and participated in field work. D.J.A.B. and B.G.A. conducted geomorphic mapping. R.S. carried out laboratory work. A.M.D. participated in the field work. T.J.H.C. conducted snowline reconstructions. R.C.F. conducted accelerator mass spectrometer analyses. G.H.D., D.J.A.B., J.M.S. and A.M.D. helped write the paper.

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Correspondence to Aaron E. Putnam.

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Putnam, A., Schaefer, J., Denton, G. et al. Regional climate control of glaciers in New Zealand and Europe during the pre-industrial Holocene. Nature Geosci 5, 627–630 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1548

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