Deglacial warm events in the Southern Ocean are felt in the tropics

Dec 16, 2019, 13:15 Uhr

MARUM Research Seminar

MARUM I, room 2070

Paola Moffa-Sánchez

Mode waters form around the Southern Ocean by air-sea interaction and spread northwards through the ocean’s interior eventually surfacing in the tropical latitudes via equatorial upwelling. Deglacial changes in the circulation around the Southern Ocean are key to understand degassing of CO₂, nutrient redistribution, and the transmission of climate changes from high to low latitudes. Yet, because of the mid-depth nature of these waters, there is a scarcity of high sedimentation cores in locations bathed by Southern Ocean derived intermediate and mode waters. For this reason, the exact linkages between high to low latitude climate in the past remain elusive. During this seminar I will present multi-depth temperature reconstructions from a sediment core recovered from the coast of Papua New Guinea extending the last 17 kyrs to gain insights into the deglacial shifts in the formation of mode waters around the Southern Ocean and their transmission to the tropical Pacific.