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PALEOCEANOGRAPHY

North Atlantic Core GGC5 231Pa/230Th Meridional Circulation Data
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McManus, J.F., R. Francois, J.-M. Gherardi, L.D. Keigwin, and S. Brown-Leger. 2004. Collapse and rapid resumption of Atlantic meridional circulationlinked to deglacial climate changes. Nature, 428, 834-837.
Data Coverage North: 33.7 * South: 33.7
West: -57.58 * East: -57.58
Altitude: -4550 m

Start Year: 20020 14C yr BP * End Year: 100 14C yr BP

Data:     Please Cite Data Contributors!
 SynTraCE(development): o326-gc5-sytr-tab.txt
  o326-gc5-tab.txt
  mcmanus2004

Summary:

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is widely believed to affect climate. Changes in ocean circulation have been inferred from records of the deep water chemical composition derived from sedimentary nutrient proxies, but their impact on climate is difficult to assess because such reconstructions provide insufficient constraints on the rate of overturning. Here we report measurements of 231Pa/230Th, a kinematic proxy for the meridional overturning circulation, in a sediment core from the subtropical North Atlantic Ocean. We find that the meridional overturning was nearly, or completely, eliminated during the coldest deglacial interval in the North Atlantic region, beginning with the catastrophic iceberg discharge Heinrich event H1, 17,500 yr ago, and declined sharply but briefly into the Younger Dryas cold event, about 12,700 yr ago. Following these cold events, the 231Pa/230Th record indicates that rapid accelerations of the meridional overturning circulation were concurrent with the two strongest regional warming events during deglaciation. These results confirm the significance of variations in the rate of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation for abrupt climate changes.
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Parameters:

radiocarbon years before 1950AD; Pa/Th 238-based error; Pa/Th 238-based; Pa/Th 232-based; delta O18 PDB (Globorotalia inflata); Pa/Th 232-based error

Complete XML Record:

noaa-ocean-6406  (Last Revised: 2009-08-21 )

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