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| Titel |
Tropical Atlantic temperature seasonality at the end of the last interglacial |
| VerfasserIn |
Thomas Felis, Cyril Giry, Denis Scholz, Gerrit Lohmann, Madlene Pfeiffer, Jürgen Pätzold, Martin Kölling, Sander R. Scheffers |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2015
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 17 (2015) |
| Datensatznummer |
250111952
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2015-12105.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| The end of the last interglacial period, ~118 kyr ago, was characterized by substantial ocean
circulation and climate perturbations resulting from instabilities of polar ice sheets. It
has been suggested that these perturbations at the end of the last interglacial are
crucial for a better understanding of future climate change. The seasonal temperature
changes of the tropical ocean, however, which play an important role in seasonal
climate extremes such as hurricanes, floods and droughts at the present day, are not
well known for this period that led into the last glacial. Here we present a monthly
resolved snapshot of reconstructed sea surface temperature in the tropical North
Atlantic Ocean for 117.7 ± 0.8 kyr ago, using coral Sr/Ca and δ18O records in a
precisely 230Th/U dated shallow-water fossil coral recovered from the southern
Caribbean (Bonaire). We find that temperature seasonality was similar to today, which is
consistent with the orbital insolation forcing. Our coral records and simulations with
a coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model (COSMOS) indicate an
orbital control on temperature seasonality in the tropical North Atlantic at the end of
the last interglacial, despite the large-scale perturbations of ocean circulation and
climate during this period, and suggest that temperature seasonality of the tropical
surface ocean is controlled mainly by orbital insolation changes during interglacials. |
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