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High sea surface temperatures in tropical warm pools during the Pliocene

Nature Geoscience volume 7, pages 606–611 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

The western warm pools of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans are a critical source of heat and moisture for the tropical climate system. Over the past five million years, global mean temperatures have cooled by 3–4 °C. Yet, present reconstructions of sea surface temperatures indicate that temperature in the warm pools has remained stable during this time. This stability has been used to suggest that tropical sea surface temperatures are controlled by a thermostat-like mechanism that maintained consistent temperatures. Here we reconstruct sea surface temperatures in the South China Sea, Caribbean Sea and western equatorial Pacific Ocean for the past five million years, using a combination of the Mg/Ca-, TEX86H- and -surface-temperature proxies. Our data indicate that during the period of Pliocene warmth from about 5 to 2.6 million years ago, the western Pacific and western Atlantic warm pools were about 2 °C warmer than today. We suggest that the apparent lack of warmth seen in the previous reconstructions was an artefact of low seawater Mg/Ca ratios in the Pliocene oceans. Taking this bias into account, our data indicate that tropical sea surface temperatures did change in conjunction with global mean temperatures. We therefore conclude that the temperature of the warm pools of the equatorial oceans during the Pliocene was not limited by a thermostat-like mechanism.

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Figure 1: Map of mean annual ocean surface temperatures and locations of the sediment cores discussed in this paper30,48.
Figure 2: Pliocene to recent warm pool SST estimates.
Figure 3: Plio-Pleistocene warm pool evolution.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a NERC studentship awarded to C.L.O’B. and a NERC standard grant NE/H006273/1 awarded to R.D.P. (Principal Investigator) and G.L.F. (Co-Investigator). R.D.P. also acknowledges the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. M.A.M-B. gratefully acknowledges the support of the European Community through a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for Career Development. Samples were provided by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. We would like to thank K. Edgar for helpful discussions on diagenesis of foraminifera.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Organic Geochemistry Unit, School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TS, UK

    Charlotte L. O’Brien & Richard D. Pancost

  2. Cabot Institute, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UJ, UK

    Charlotte L. O’Brien & Richard D. Pancost

  3. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3AN, UK

    Charlotte L. O’Brien

  4. Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre Southampton, University of Southampton, Southampton SO14 3ZH, UK

    Gavin L. Foster & Miguel A. Martínez-Botí

  5. Scottish Marine Institute, Oban PA37 1QA, UK

    Richard Abell

  6. Department of Earth Sciences, Irvine Building, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9AL, UK

    James W. B. Rae

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Contributions

C.L.O’B. collected all of the data (except where otherwise noted), interpreted results, and prepared the manuscript and figures. G.L.F. and R.D.P. supervised the project, and aided in interpretation, figure making and editing the manuscript. M.A.M-B. generated the G. ruber Mg/Ca data for Site 999. R.A. and G.L.F. generated the G. sacculifer Mg/Ca data for Site 999. J.W.B.R. aided in the collection of G. sacculifer Mg/Ca data for Site 1143, figure making and editing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Charlotte L. O’Brien.

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O’Brien, C., Foster, G., Martínez-Botí, M. et al. High sea surface temperatures in tropical warm pools during the Pliocene. Nature Geosci 7, 606–611 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2194

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