Cooling of Northwest Atlantic slope waters during the Holocene

• Main Author: Julian P. Sachs
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2007
• Subjects: Canada; Greenland; Greenland ice cores; Labrador Sea; Northwest Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.497.1021; http://folk.uib.no/abo007/share/papers/8k/sachs07.grl.pdf

usually described as warm and stable. Benchmark temperature records from central Greenland ice cores show none of the large, abrupt variations that characterized the prior 100,000 years of glacial climate. Nor do they show any substantial trend, indicating at most 1–3C of cooling. Here we show that the slope waters east of the United States and Canada cooled 4–10C during the Holocene. Declining insolation, increasing convection in the Labrador Sea, and equatorward shifting of the Gulf Stream path may have caused the cooling.