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Reply to 'Eocene temperature gradients'

Nature Geoscience volume 10, pages 539–540 (2017)Cite this article

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Sze Ling Ho and Thomas Laepple reply —

Jessica Tierney and colleagues question the compatibility of our proposed calibration1 with ecological evidence. However, our approach was designed with the diverging interpretations of the depth origin of TEX86 in the literature in mind. Contrary to the claim of Tierney et al., we do not a priori assume any depth range but use additional information of past temporal variability to constrain the depth ranges. In the resulting calibration ensemble, the most commonly occurring depths are 100–350 m (depths in >80% of calibration members, full distributions are in the Supplementary Information); this should not be confused with the single calibration with the highest occurrence (0–550 m). This depth range is in agreement with the evidence Tierney et al. summarize. Similarly, the sensitivity derived from mesocosm experiments2,3 (52 °C per unit in combined datasets4) is in fact closer to our estimate (40.8 °C per unit ) than to the most commonly applied calibration4 (68.4 °C per unit ) or the effective slope of BAYSPAR5 (80.8 °C per unit ); a result robust to the uncertainty introduced by different TEX86 indices and regression methods.

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Reply to 'Eocene temperature gradients'. Nature Geosci 10, 539–540 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2998

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