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Divergent trends in land and ocean temperature in the Southern Ocean over the past 18,000 years

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Abstract

Over the past 18,000 years, sea surface temperatures for the Southern Ocean do not align with those of the adjacent, high-latitude landmasses. During the late glacial period, the ocean surface warmed rapidly to present-day temperatures1, whereas the land warmed only slowly, as evidenced by the lagged response of forest and glaciers2,3. However, in the Holocene epoch, land-based records suggest strong warming whereas marine records indicate that ocean surface temperatures cooled. Here we present reconstructions of summer temperature for Campbell Island, in the Southern Ocean, over the past 16,500 years based on fossil pollen. We find a pronounced warming 12,500–11,000 years ago, a cooling until 9,200 years ago, and a rapid warming to a peak between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago, followed by minor cool intervals from 5,200–4,000, 3,000–1,700 and 700–100 years ago. As expected, our temperature reconstructions show a late glacial lag behind nearby records of sea surface temperature6,7, and opposing trends in the Holocene. We suggest that this discrepancy arises because land-based reconstructions record summer temperatures, whereas marine proxies generally reflect annual temperatures. We conclude that the divergence of the records therefore reflects changes in the seasonality of atmospheric heat transport. As atmospheric heat transport is tied to the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds, we attribute our observed changes to shifts in the position and intensity of the southern westerlies.

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Figure 1
Figure 2: Summary pollen diagrams, inorganic matter content and summer temperature reconstructions.
Figure 3: Campbell Island summer temperature records compared against key palaeoclimate records from the Southern Ocean and Antarctica over the past 18 kyr.

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Acknowledgements

M.S.M. and J.M.W. were supported by funds from the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology New Zealand, in the Ecosystem Resilience Outcome Based Investment programme. C.S.M.T. is grateful for the Philip Leverhulme Prize that helped support his contribution to this work. H. Jones and S. Rouillard kindly prepared the figures.

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M.S.M. and J.M.W. carried out the field work, M.S.M. the pollen analyses and J.M.W. the quantification; C.S.M.T. developed the chronology; J.R. undertook the atmospheric circulation analyses and K.P. the interpretation of marine records. M.S.M. and C.S.M.T. wrote the Letter and all commented on the text.

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Correspondence to Matt S. McGlone.

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McGlone, M., Turney, C., Wilmshurst, J. et al. Divergent trends in land and ocean temperature in the Southern Ocean over the past 18,000 years. Nature Geosci 3, 622–626 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo931

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