Abrupt climate oscillations during the last deglaciation in central North America

• Main Authors: Zicheng Yu, Ulrich Eicher
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1998
• Subjects: Boa; Greenland; Greenland ice cores; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.655.2609; http://labs.eeb.utoronto.ca/mcandrews/PDFs/Yu1998SCI%5B1%5D.pdf

Evidence from stable isotopes and a variety of proxies from two Ontario lakes demonstrate that many of the late glacial—to—early Holocene events that are well known from the North Atlantic seaboard, such as the Gerzensee-Killarney Oscillation (also known as the Intra-Aller¿d Cold Period), Younger Dryas, and Preboreal Oscillation, also occurred in central North America. These results thus imply that climatic forcing acted in the same manner in both regions and that atmospheric circulation played an important role in the propagation of these events. The transition from the last glacial maximum to the present interglacial (Holocene) has great importance in understanding how Earth’s climate system can abruptly switch from one state to another. The most detailed records of this transition—the late glacial period—are from the North Atlantic region, which appears to have acted as either a trig-ger or an amplifier of late glacial climate events. This transition [;13,000 to 9000 14C years before the present (yr B.P.)] was char-acterized by several broad-scale climatic os-cillations in the North Atlantic region (1–6). Isotopic records from Europe (4, 7, 8) and Greenland ice cores (2, 3) reveal a late glacial climate sequence in which the warm Bølling-Allerød (BOA) was followed by the cold Younger Dryas (YD) at;11,000 to 10,000 14C yr B.P. and then by the warm Holocene.