Indian Monsoon Leads the Dansgaard-Oeschger Events of Greenland: New Evidence From the Bay of Bengal

In recent years a growing body of evidence has been pouring in mainly from marine records, supporting the hypotheses that temperature changes in the Arctic and Greenland steer the intensity of the Asian Monsoon. However, the physical link between the high latitude climate and monsoons are still elusive. Here we use oxygen isotopic ratios and Mg/Ca ratios of planktonic foraminifera species Globigerinoides ruber from a sediment core in the Bay of Bengal (BOB) to reconstruct sea surface temperature (SST) and surface water oxygen isotopic values. We find that oxygen isotopic values of water (monsoon signal) and SST of BOB lead the Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events. Therefore, it is proposed here that the monsoon could kick the start of millennial scale abrupt climate changes through the shifts of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and associated convection, water vapor supply to the tropical troposphere and latent heat penetration.