Evidence for Obliquity Forcing of Glacial Termination II

Variations in the intensity of high-latitude Northern Hemisphere summer insolation, driven largely by precession of the equinoxes, are widely thought to control the timing of Late Pleistocene glacial terminations. However, recently it has been suggested that changes in Earth’s obliquity may be a mor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science
Main Authors: Drysdale, R. N., Hellstrom, J. C., Zanchetta, G., Fallick, A. E., Sánchez Goñi, M. F., Couchoud, I., McDonald, J., Maas, R., Lohmann, Gerrit, Isola, I.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: 2009
Subjects:
North Atlantic
Online Access:https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/21133/
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1170371
https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.33422
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Summary:Variations in the intensity of high-latitude Northern Hemisphere summer insolation, driven largely by precession of the equinoxes, are widely thought to control the timing of Late Pleistocene glacial terminations. However, recently it has been suggested that changes in Earth’s obliquity may be a more important mechanism. We present a new speleothem-based North Atlantic marine chronology that shows that the penultimate glacial termination (Termination II) commenced 141,000 ± 2500 years before the present, too early to be explained by Northern Hemisphere summer insolation but consistent with changes in Earth’s obliquity. Our record reveals that Terminations I and II are separated by three obliquity cycles and that they started at near-identical obliquity phases.

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