Isabelle Couchoud

Evidence for Obliquity Forcing of Glacial Termination II

Oblique Reasoning In Milankovich theory, the canonical theory of glaciation and deglaciation, ice sheets wax and wane in response to the amount of summer insolation at a latitude of 65°N, which is consistent with the observed timing of the last deglaciation. The penultimate glaciation behaved quite differently, however. Now, Drysdale et al. (p. 1527, published online 13 August) offer firmer constraints on the timing of the penultimate deglaciation, by correlating a difficult-to-date marine record of ocean volume to a precisely datable nearby speleothem (terrestrial stalagmite). Ocean volume began to increase about 141,000 years ago, thousands of years before the rise in 65°N summer insolation. Thus, instead of the forcing mechanism proposed by Milankovich, variations in Earths obliquity may be mostly responsible for the disappearance of ice sheets. Marine records suggest that the early onset of the penultimate deglaciation was due to changes in Earth’s obliquity. Variations in the intensity of high-latitude Northern Hemisphere summer insolation, driven largely by precession of the equinoxes, are widely thought to control the timing of Late Pleistocene glacial terminations. However, recently it has been suggested that changes in Earth’s obliquity may be a more important mechanism. We present a new speleothem-based North Atlantic marine chronology that shows that the penultimate glacial termination (Termination II) commenced 141,000 ± 2500 years before the present, too early to be explained by Northern Hemisphere summer insolation but consistent with changes in Earth’s obliquity. Our record reveals that Terminations I and II are separated by three obliquity cycles and that they started at near-identical obliquity phases.

Petrographical and geochemical changes in Bosnian stalagmites and their palaeo-environmental significance

Detailed petrographic observations have been coupled with trace element and δ13C - δ18O analyses in order to investigate their dynamics in two Holocene Bosnian speleothems. The potential of this multiproxy approach in providing a means to extract palaeo-environmental information from stalagmites whose stable isotope signals are noisy and without obvious trends has been tested. The studied stalagmites are mostly characterized by columnar microcrystalline fabric. At the sub-millimetre scale of lamination, different microcrystalline columnar sub-types (open and closed) have been detected and classified on the basis of the observed porosity and the crystallite size. The presence of variations in crystallite arrangement at the lamina scale suggests the occurrence of small-scale environmental changes recorded in the studied samples. A positive correlation was found found between Mg concentration, δ13C and fabric variations, while a negative correlation relates those parameters with Sr concentration. Both δ13C and fabric changes appear to be directly related to changes in hydrology. The detailed observation of calcite fabrics combined with stable isotope and trace element profiles allowed for the interpretation of the conditions under which the speleothems were deposited.