Abstract
CHANGING conditions in the North Atlantic region may drive global climate changes1,2. According to previous reconstructions of the last interglacial (the Eemian), North Atlantic sea surface tempera-tures (SSTs) were similar to present-day values3. In the Norwegian Sea, even warmer conditions appeared as a single pulse of short duration4,5, whereas the Greenland ice record suggests that the warm interglacial air temperatures were interrupted by several cold periods6. Here we use faunal and stable-isotope analyses of foraminifera in two sediment cores from the North Atlantic ocean and Norwegian Sea to reconstruct high-resolution records of SST and sea surface salinity (SSS) during the Eemian interglacial. Our results, which differ significantly from the Greenland record6, show a sharp decrease in SST and SSS of the Norwegian Sea, associated with a more moderate cooling and freshening of the North Atlantic at the middle of isotope substage 5e, several millennia before the beginning of continental ice-sheet growth. Changes in the Norweg-ian Sea surface conditions appear to have represented an important climate change affecting global atmospheric and thermohaline circulations.
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Cortijo, E., Duplessy, J., Labeyrie, L. et al. Eemian cooling in the Norwegian Sea and North Atlantic ocean preceding continental ice-sheet growth. Nature 372, 446–449 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1038/372446a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/372446a0
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