Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © Authors, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of Elsevier for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters 396 (2014): 134-142, doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2014.04.008.
Description:
Amplifying both internally generated variability and remote climate signals from the
Atlantic Ocean via coupled air-sea instabilities, the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP) is well
situated to detect past climate changes and variations in Central American wind systems
that dynamically link the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Here we compare new and previously published alkenone-based sea surface
temperature (SST) reconstructions from diverse environments within the ETP, i.e. the
Eastern Pacific Warm Pool (EPWP), the equatorial and the northern Peruvian Upwelling
regions over the past 100,000 years. Over this time period, a fairly constant meridional
temperature gradient across the region is observed, indicating similar hydrographic
conditions during glacial and interglacial periods. The data further reveal that millennial-
scale cold events associated with massive iceberg surges in the North Atlantic (Heinrich
events) generate cooling in the ETP from ~8°N to ~2°S. Data from Heinrich event 1
however indicate that the response changes sign south of 2°S. These millennial-scale
alterations of the SST pattern across diverse environments of the ETP support previous
climate modeling experiments that suggested an Atlantic-Pacific connection caused by
the intensification of the Central American gap winds, enhanced upwelling and mixing
north of the equator and supported by positive air-sea feedbacks in the eastern tropical
Pacific.
Description:
Funding of this study was
provided by NSERC Canada (M.K.), the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
(CIFAR; M.K.), the Geological Society of America (GSA; N.D.), the Swiss NSF (SNSF
grant PBSKP2-128454 for N.D.), the U.S. NSF (1010869, 1204011 for A.T.) and the
Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (A.T).
Keywords:
Eastern Pacific
;
Heinrich events
;
Winds
;
Sea surface temperature
;
Alkenone
;
EOF
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Preprint
Format:
application/pdf
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