Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Praetorius, S. K., Condron, A., Mix, A. C., Walczak, M. H., McKay, J. L., & Du, J. The role of northeast pacific meltwater events in deglacial climate change. Science Advances, 6(9), (2020): eaay2915, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aay2915.
Description:
Columbia River megafloods occurred repeatedly during the last deglaciation, but the impacts of this fresh water on Pacific hydrography are largely unknown. To reconstruct changes in ocean circulation during this period, we used a numerical model to simulate the flow trajectory of Columbia River megafloods and compiled records of sea surface temperature, paleo-salinity, and deep-water radiocarbon from marine sediment cores in the Northeast Pacific. The North Pacific sea surface cooled and freshened during the early deglacial (19.0-16.5 ka) and Younger Dryas (12.9-11.7 ka) intervals, coincident with the appearance of subsurface water masses depleted in radiocarbon relative to the sea surface. We infer that Pacific meltwater fluxes contributed to net Northern Hemisphere cooling prior to North Atlantic Heinrich Events, and again during the Younger Dryas stadial. Abrupt warming in the Northeast Pacific similarly contributed to hemispheric warming during the Bølling and Holocene transitions. These findings underscore the importance of changes in North Pacific freshwater fluxes and circulation in deglacial climate events.
Description:
The research was partly supported by the NSF through grants ARC-257 1204045 and PLR-1417667. The numerical model simulations used resources from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility operated under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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