ALBERT

Description: Oceanic oxygen decline due to anthropogenic climate change is a matter of growing concern. Tropical oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) are the most important areas of oxygen depletion in the modern oceans. A quantitative oxygen proxy in OMZs is highly desirable in order to identify and monitor recent dynamics as well as to reconstruct pre-Anthropocene changes in amplitude and extension of oxygen depletion. A previous study revealed that there are significant correlations between I/Ca ratios of foraminiferal bulk samples for different benthic foraminiferal species from the Peruvian OMZ. Nevertheless, species for which less specimens were available showed a higher variability between I/Ca ratios in different badges. To test if this might be related to intra- or inter-shell heterogeneity we focused on microanalyses of I/Ca ratios within these species in our present study. We developed a method for measuring benthic foraminiferal I/Ca ratios, a potential proxy for the reconstruction of marine oxygen concentrations. We applied 92 spot analyses in individual foraminiferal specimens from the Peruvian OMZ using secondary ion mass-spectrometry (SIMS). The I/Ca ratios on 8 of 11 cleaned Uvigerina striata and Planulina limbata specimens determined with SIMS showed no significant difference to previous ICP-MS measurements on bulk samples from the same species. This indicates that both techniques are suited to the analysis and that the applied cleaning protocols efficiently removed the strong iodine contaminations. Nevertheless, despite the highly significant correlation between bulk ICP-MS I/Ca ratios and bottom water oxygen concentrations for U. striata, no significant correlation was observed for the SIMS derived individual I/Ca ratios. This indicates that ICP-MS bulk analyses on pooled bulk samples might be more suitable for reliable oxygen reconstructions using I/Ca ratios. On the contrary, the strong intra-test (e.g. -shell) variations could be induced by the oxygen variability in the habitats of foraminifera. Therefore, the high resolution findings provide the perspective for tracking relative short term oxygen fluctuations by measuring ontogenetic changes in I/Ca ratios within individual foraminiferal tests. Measurements on cross-sections of uncleaned U. striata specimens revealed a strong contaminant iodine phase within the massive centre of the foraminiferal test walls which usually would be considered to be free of contamination. The contaminant iodine is probably associated to organic matter and located inside a microporous framework within the foraminiferal calcite. This might be related to microtubular structures which have been revealed in previous studies during early dissolution states of foraminiferal test walls.