Gateways, Supergyre, and proto-Antarctic Circumpolar Current in the middle to late Eocene

The (proto-)Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) began to develop in the middle Eocene through a shallow Drake Passage and Tasman Gateway. Progressive deepening of these gateways and northward migration of Australia through the Eocene impacted global ocean circulation. We present middle to late Eocene (~36-40 Ma) benthic foraminiferal stable isotope (δ18O, δ13C) records from ODP Site 1090 that extend published late Eocene-early Oligocene records (Pusz et al. 2011). Comparisons with published isotope records highlight that the deep (~3000m) eastern and western South Atlantic (Sites 699 (Mead et al. 1993) and 1090) was warmer than the shallower (~1500-2500m) Southern Ocean Sites 689 (Diester-Haass and Zahn, 1996; Bohaty et al., 2012). The divergence in the δ18O records began in the late middle Eocene and continued through the late Eocene, as the Drake and Tasman gateways progressively deepened, and Australia moved northward. We speculate that these paleogeographic changes resulted in the development of circulation analogous to the modern Supergyre, which transported warm Indian and Pacific water westward into the South Atlantic and cooler South Atlantic water eastward into the Pacific Ocean via the Tasman Seaway, and acted as a barrier that prevented subtropical water from flowing to high southern latitudes. At the same time, a significant carbon isotopic (δ13C) offset developed between Site 1090 (values ~ 0.7‰ lower) and other sites from ~37.5 to 34 Ma, coinciding with onset of elevated opaline silica (Diekmann et al. 2004), barite, carbonate, and phosphorous (Anderson and Delaney 2005) deposition at Site 1090; these changes are consistent with enhanced primary productivity at the northern edge of the developing polar front, consistent with model predictions for the effects of proto-ACC development (Heinze and Crowley, 1997; Toggweiler and Bjornsson, 2000).