Jason A. Addison

North Pacific deglacial hypoxic events linked to abrupt ocean warming

Marine sediments from the North Pacific document two episodes of expansion and strengthening of the subsurface oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) accompanied by seafloor hypoxia during the last deglacial transition. The mechanisms driving this hypoxia remain under debate. We present a new high-resolution alkenone palaeotemperature reconstruction from the Gulf of Alaska that reveals two abrupt warming events of 4–5 degrees Celsius at the onset of the Bølling and Holocene intervals that coincide with sudden shifts to hypoxia at intermediate depths. The presence of diatomaceous laminations and hypoxia-tolerant benthic foraminiferal species, peaks in redox-sensitive trace metals, and enhanced 15N/14N ratio of organic matter, collectively suggest association with high export production. A decrease in 18O/16O values of benthic foraminifera accompanying the most severe deoxygenation event indicates subsurface warming of up to about 2 degrees Celsius. We infer that abrupt warming triggered expansion of the North Pacific OMZ through reduced oxygen solubility and increased marine productivity via physiological effects; following initiation of hypoxia, remobilization of iron from hypoxic sediments could have provided a positive feedback on ocean deoxygenation through increased nutrient utilization and carbon export. Such a biogeochemical amplification process implies high sensitivity of OMZ expansion to warming.

A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era

Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records are from trees, ice, sediment, corals, speleothems, documentary evidence, and other archives. They range in length from 50 to 2000 years, with a median of 547 years, while temporal resolution ranges from biweekly to centennial. Nearly half of the proxy time series are significantly correlated with HadCRUT4.2 surface temperature over the period 1850–2014. Global temperature composites show a remarkable degree of coherence between high- and low-resolution archives, with broadly similar patterns across archive types, terrestrial versus marine locations, and screening criteria. The database is suited to investigations of global and regional temperature variability over the Common Era, and is shared in the Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format, including serializations in Matlab, R and Python.

Methane gas release from the Storegga submarine landslide linked to earlyHolocene climate change: a speculative hypothesis

The 3000 km3 Storegga submarine landslide occurred c. 8150 years ago from an area rich in gas hydrates off the western coast of Norway. A synchronous increase of 80—100 ppb in atmospheric methane concentrations is recorded in the Greenland GRIP ice core. This increase is hypothesized to reflect methane releases from the Storegga slide debris at an estimated rate of 20—25 Tg/yr for several hundred years following the slide. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and methane release from the Storegga submarine landslide may have contributed to the rapid termination of the brief but intense 8200 yr cold event and the subsequent evolution of Holocene climate.

Ice-sheet modulation of deglacial North American monsoon intensification

The North American monsoon, the dominant source of rainfall for much of the arid US Southwest, remains one of the least understood monsoon systems. The late Pleistocene evolution of this monsoon is poorly constrained, largely because glacial changes in winter rainfall obscure summer monsoon signatures in many regional proxy records. Here, we develop deglacial records of monsoon strength from isotopic analyses of leaf wax biomarkers in marine sediment cores. Reconstructions indicate a regional decrease in monsoon rainfall during the Last Glacial Maximum, and that the deglacial trajectory of the North American monsoon closely tracks changes in North American ice cover. In climate model simulations, North American ice cover shifts the westerlies southwards, favouring the mixing of cold, dry air into the US Southwest. This process, known as ventilation, weakens the monsoon by diluting the energy fluxes required for convection. As the ice sheet retreats northwards, the monsoon strengthens, and local ocean conditions may play a larger role in regulating its intensity. We conclude that on glacial–interglacial timescales, ice-sheet-induced reorganizations of atmospheric circulation have a dominant influence on the North American monsoon.The intensity of the North American summer monsoon was modified by changes in the extent of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum and subsequent deglaciation, according to isotope records and numerical simulations.

Data Descriptor: A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era

PAGES, a core project of Future Earth, is supported by the U.S. and Swiss National Science Foundations. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government. Some of this work was conducted as part of the North America 2k Working Group supported by the John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis, funded by the U.S. Geological Survey. B. Bauer, W. Gross, and E. Gille (NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information) are gratefully acknowledged for helping assemble the data citations and creating the NCEI versions of the PAGES 2k data records. We thank all the investigators whose commitment to data sharing enables the open science ethos embodied by this project.