Phasing of millennial-scale climate variability in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans

• Published in: Science
• Main Authors: Walczak, Maureen H., Mix, Alan C., Cowan, Ellen A., Fallon, Stewart, Fifield, L. Keith, Alder, Jay R., Du, Jianghui, Haley, Brian, Hobern, Tim, Padman, June, Praetorius, Summer K., Schmittner, Andreas, Stoner, Joseph S., Zellers, Sarah D.
• Other Authors: American Australian Association, Australian Research Council, National Science Foundation, Australian and New Zealand International Ocean Discovery Program Consortium
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2020
• Subjects: Gulf of Alaska; Pacific; Ice Sheet; North Atlantic; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aba7096; https://syndication.highwire.org/content/doi/10.1126/science.aba7096; https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.aba7096

Calving cousins Walczak et al. report that increases in Pacific Ocean ventilation and periods of rapid production of icebergs from the Cordilleran Ice Sheet during the last glacial period preceded episodic iceberg discharges into the Atlantic Ocean (see the Perspective by Jaeger and Shevenell). Marine sediments from the Gulf of Alaska show that increases in vertical mixing of the ocean there correspond with intense iceberg calving from the ice sheet that covered much of high-latitude western North America and that these changes occurred before the analogous Heinrich events in the North Atlantic. Thus, these Pacific climate system reorganizations may have been an early part of a cascade of dynamic climate events with global repercussions. Science , this issue p. 716 see also p. 662