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Persistent summer expansion of the Atlantic Warm Pool during glacial abrupt cold events

Abstract

Palaeoclimate records and numerical model simulations indicate that changes in tropical and subtropical sea surface temperatures and in the annual average position of the intertropical convergence zone are linked to high-latitude climate changes on millennial to glacial–interglacial timescales1,2,3,4,5,6,7. It has recently been suggested that cooling in the high latitudes associated with abrupt climate-change events is evident primarily during the northern hemisphere winter, implying increased seasonality at these times8. However, it is unclear whether such a seasonal bias also exists for the low latitudes. Here we analyse the Mg/Ca ratios of surface-dwelling foraminifera to reconstruct sea surface temperatures in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico for the past 300,000 years. We suggest that sea surface temperatures are controlled by the migration of the northern boundary of the Atlantic Warm Pool, and hence the position of the intertropical convergence zone during boreal summer, and are relatively insensitive to winter conditions. Our results suggest that summer Atlantic Warm Pool expansion is primarily affected by glacial–interglacial variability and low-latitude summer insolation. Because a clear signature of rapid climate-change events, such as the Younger Dryas cold event, is lacking in our record, we conclude that high-latitude events seem to influence only the winter Caribbean climate conditions, consistent with the hypothesis of extreme northern-hemisphere seasonality during abrupt cooling events8.

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Figure 1: Global SSTs and positions of the ITCZ during February and September.
Figure 2: Paleorecords from MD02-2575.
Figure 3: Cross-spectral analysis between benthic δ18O and the SSTMg/Ca time series (MD02-2575) (ref. 15).
Figure 4: NGRIP, the Cariaco Basin and the Gulf of Mexico in comparison.

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Acknowledgements

Funding of this research was provided by the German Science Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the International Marine Past Global Change Study and the DFG research group ‘Impact of gateways on ocean circulation, climate and evolution’ and by the Netherlands Science Organization (NWO). We thank the Shipboard Scientific Party and crew of RV Marion Dufrèsne cruise MD-127 (Pages) in 2002 for their kind support. We are grateful for comments and technical support by D. G. Schönberg, M. Regenberg, J. Groeneveld, H. Abels, T. Jilbert, G.-J. Reichart and F. Hilgen, who helped to improve the manuscript.

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Ziegler, M., Nürnberg, D., Karas, C. et al. Persistent summer expansion of the Atlantic Warm Pool during glacial abrupt cold events. Nature Geosci 1, 601–605 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo277

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