Million year cycles in the Fe, Mg and Ni records of a ferromanganese crust from the equatorial Indian Ocean

In search of long term productivity signals, a high resolution geochemical study was undertaken by using the life sustaining iron and magnesium contents in a slowly accreting 26 mm thick hydrogenous Fe-Mn crust representing around 12 Million years (Ma) record from the equatorial Indian Ocean. We analyzed Fe, Mg, Ni, Co, and other trace metals by using electron probe micro-analyzer at 100 micron interval. The geochemical data was averaged at every 1 mm interval and subjected to statistical analyses. The crust was dated using standard cobalt-chronometry (Manheim and Lane-Bostwick, 1998). Mixed age-depth model (Heegaard et al., 2005) was applied to ascertain the error limits in the computed ages for each millimeter of the crust. Thereafter, the Red-fit (Schulz and Mudelsee, 2002) and multi-taper (Thompson, 1990) spectral analyses of Fe, Mg and Ni revealed the existence of the significant (>90%) cycles at around 3, 1.5, and 1.2 Ma. We surmise that Fe and Mg cycles represented the changes in oceanic productivity as these metals are essentially used in sustaining the oceanic phyto- and zoo-plankton productivity in the surface water. The Fe/Ni ratio, which is attributed to meteoritic dust influx (Johnson, 2001), also revealed the similar cycles suggesting a possibility of Ni input from the meteoritic dust in the past. We compared the geochemical time- series data with the Earth's orbital eccentricity and summer solar insolation (Berger, 1979) at the equator for the last 10 million years. The Redfit and multi-taper analyses of the eccentricity and the insolation also resulted similar cycles at around 1.5 and 1.2 Ma. Therefore, we surmise that the Fe, Mg, and Ni cycles at 1.5, and 1.2 Ma could be result of the geochemical response to the Earth's eccentricity related solar insolation changes. Earlier studies reported cycles due to eccentricity (0.4, 0.126, 0.95 Ma), tilt (0.041 Ma) and precession (0.023 Ma) in Indian Ocean, whereas we report here 3, 1.5 and 1.2 Ma supra-Milankovitch cycles for the first time from the equatorial Indian Ocean.