Jose Dominick Guballa, Jörg Bollmann, Katherine Schmidt, A. Lückge
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
The global impact of the Youngest Toba Tuff (YTT) supereruption is still heavily debated, ranging from having little effects on climate to significantly affecting modern human evolution. Climate models and proxy records show that the eruption may have caused cooling of the Asian landmass, thus impacting regional climate such as the Indian monsoon system. However, the immediate effect of the eruption on the Indian monsoon has not been indisputably demonstrated in any proxy record. Here, we present a paleo‐primary productivity (PP) record in core SO130‐289KL from the northeastern Arabian Sea based on the coccolithophore species Florisphaera profunda transfer function. Florisphaera profunda decreased from ∼30% before the YTT eruption to ∼8% right after the YTT eruption, which translates to an increase in PP by ∼65% from a long‐term average of ∼200 gC/m2/yr for about 8–19 years after the eruption. The duration was estimated using a new error‐weighted mean age of the YTT eruption (73.9 ± 0.1 ka, 2σ uncertainties) based on recent age estimates from ice cores, radiometric dating, and speleothem records. The elevated PP is most likely linked to the deepening of the surface ocean mixed layer driven by strengthened northeasterly Indian winter monsoon winds. This hypothesis is supported by stable oxygen isotope records from speleothem and ice cores, which show indications of a strengthening of the Indian winter monsoon during times of increased PP. Our results support previous modeling studies and provide unequivocal evidence from a marine record for an Indian monsoon response to the supereruption.
期刊介绍:
Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology (PALO) publishes papers dealing with records of past environments, biota and climate. Understanding of the Earth system as it was in the past requires the employment of a wide range of approaches including marine and lacustrine sedimentology and speleothems; ice sheet formation and flow; stable isotope, trace element, and organic geochemistry; paleontology and molecular paleontology; evolutionary processes; mineralization in organisms; understanding tree-ring formation; seismic stratigraphy; physical, chemical, and biological oceanography; geochemical, climate and earth system modeling, and many others. The scope of this journal is regional to global, rather than local, and includes studies of any geologic age (Precambrian to Quaternary, including modern analogs). Within this framework, papers on the following topics are to be included: chronology, stratigraphy (where relevant to correlation of paleoceanographic events), paleoreconstructions, paleoceanographic modeling, paleocirculation (deep, intermediate, and shallow), paleoclimatology (e.g., paleowinds and cryosphere history), global sediment and geochemical cycles, anoxia, sea level changes and effects, relations between biotic evolution and paleoceanography, biotic crises, paleobiology (e.g., ecology of “microfossils” used in paleoceanography), techniques and approaches in paleoceanographic inferences, and modern paleoceanographic analogs, and quantitative and integrative analysis of coupled ocean-atmosphere-biosphere processes. Paleoceanographic and Paleoclimate studies enable us to use the past in order to gain information on possible future climatic and biotic developments: the past is the key to the future, just as much and maybe more than the present is the key to the past.