Abrupt climate change in West Antarctica and Greenland during the last deglacial warming
Abstract
The WAIS Divide ice core is the first Southern Hemisphere record with precision similar to ice cores from Greenland. The annually resolved timescale and small gas-age ice-age difference allow the phasing of climate change in the two hemispheres to be compared with unprecedented precision. We focus on the three abrupt climate changes in Greenland during the deglacial transition and the corresponding changes at WAIS Divide. The onset of the Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR) is clearly defined in the WAIS Divide record and lagged the Bolling-Allerod (BA) warming by 150×50 years. The phasing of the other two abrupt climate changes cannot be distinguished from synchronous with an uncertainty of ~200 years because the transitions from warming to cooling (or cooling to warming) are not distinct in the WAIS Divide record. The lead-lag relationships of no more than a couple centuries confirm the tight coupling between hemispheres during the deglaciation. The independent timescale of WAIS Divide confirms that meltwater Pulse 1a began near-coincident with the BA and ACR although the lack of direct synchronization between the annually dated ice-core imescales and the radiometrically dated coral timescale prevents the phasing from being known to better than a couple of centuries. A new observation from WAIS Divide is that accumulation increased ~40% between 12.0 and 11.6 ka, with the accumulation increase ending approximately coincident with the warming at the end of the Younger Dryas in Greenland. Other Antarctic ice cores lack timescales with sufficient resolution to identify such abrupt changes so it is unclear how much of Antarctica was affected by the increased accumulation rates. The inter-hemispheric relationships are often limited to a discussion of warming, but the WAIS Divide records suggests that the moisture transport may be another important constraint on the mechanisms that drive abrupt climate change.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFM.C33A0658F
- Keywords:
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- 0724 CRYOSPHERE Ice cores;
- 1605 GLOBAL CHANGE Abrupt/rapid climate change