Reduced Surface Ocean Temperature Variability in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific During the Late Glacial Maximum

El Niño-Southern Oscillation is the largest source of global interannual variability with far-reaching climatic effects. Climate model simulations of future warming exhibit widely divergent behavior indicating an incomplete understanding of the factors that dictate tropical climate variability. Generating records of past tropical Pacific variability during times with different climate states is one approach to deepening our understanding of tropical climate change processes and improving predictions of future change. Here we reconstruct tropical Pacific ocean variability from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and from the Holocene at ODP Sites 806 and 849, located in the western equatorial Pacific (WEP) warm pool and eastern equatorial Pacific (EEP) cold tongue, respectively. We reconstruct ocean temperature variability using the intra-sample distribution of Mg/Ca values from individual foraminifera. Sea surface temperature variability is reconstructed from individual specimens of G. sacculifer analyzed for Mg/Ca values with laser ablation ICP-MS (Photon Machines Analyte.193 with HelEx sample cell coupled with a Thermo ElementXS ICP-MS, LA-ICP-MS). Subsurface temperature variability is reconstructed from individual specimens of G. tumida analyzed for Mg/Ca values by ICP-OES. Our results indicate that the cooling of last glacial maximum SSTs was greater in the WEP compared to the EEP. Furthermore, we show this cooling is not an artifact of changes in seasonal or interannual foraminiferal fluxes, but rather, reflects overall cooler temperatures and thus changes in seasonal/interannual heat fluxes. At Site 806 in the WEP, variability during the Holocene and LGM was similar, suggesting the cooling was a direct response to pCO₂-radiative forcing. In contrast, at Site 849, sea surface temperature variability during the LGM was greatly diminished in comparison to the Holocene suggesting reduced ENSO and seasonal variability. Therefore conditions in the EEP responded to both pCO₂-radiative and dynamic oceanic-atmospheric forcing. Subsurface conditions were also different in the LGM compared to the Holocene. In the WEP, the subsurface temperature was cooler in the LGM, possibly reflecting changes in the upper ocean thermal structure and mid-latitude source water regions. In the EEP, the subsurface temperatures were also cooler, but additionally exhibited higher variability in the LGM compared to the Holocene. We interpret this subsurface data to reflect enhanced seasonality in the thermocline depth driven by enhanced seasonal variations in the cross-basin pressure gradients and winds stress. Our results show that by quantifying the distribution and variability of past ocean temperatures we can differentiate between the mechanisms responsible for temperature change.