Sortable silt paleo-current proxies of sediment core GeoB13862-1 from the Southwest Atlantic ...

• Main Authors: Voigt, Ines, Chiessi, Cristiano Mazur, Piola, Alberto R, Henrich, Rüdiger
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2016
• Subjects: DEPTH, sediment/rock; AGE; Size fraction 0.063-0.010 mm, sortable silt; Sortable-silt mean; Silt/clay ratio; Gravity corer; Beckman Coulter Laser diffraction particle size analyzer LS 13 320; M78/3B; Meteor 1986; Center for Marine Environmental Sciences MARUM; Antarc*; Antarctic; NADW; North Atlantic Deep Water; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.1594/pangaea.873264; https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.873264

Antarctic Intermediate Water (AAIW) is an essential component of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) contributing to balance the southward flow of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW). However, the role of AAIW in Holocene abrupt climate changes remains poorly understood. Here we reconstruct changes in the flow strength of AAIW based on a high temporal resolution paleocurrent record from the Southwest Atlantic. Superimposed on a slight increase in AAIW strength at ~ 7 ka BP, a succession of millennial-scale AAIW variations is recognized in our paleocurrent records indicating a highly variable intermediate water circulation throughout the Holocene. Although variations in the strength and position of the Southern Westerlies Winds (SWW) are proposed to greatly influence the formation and circulation of AAIW, we cannot confirm such a potential SWW-AAIW linkage since our records of AAIW flow strength do not correlate to Holocene shifts of the SWW across the Atlantic. However, our data shows a good ... : We applied sortable silt paleo-current flow proxies (i.e., sortable silt mean size and percentage) to reconstruct relative changes in intermediate-depth contour current strength, i.e., the Antarctic Intermediate Water flow strength. Both parameters refer to the fraction of the sediment (i.e., terrigenous 10-63 µm) whose size sorting varies in response to hydrodynamic processes, where higher values reflect stronger near-bottom flow and vice versa. Grain-size distributions of the terrigenous fraction were measured with a LS 13320 Laser Diffraction Particle Size Analyzers, resulting in 116 size classes from 0.04 to 2000 µm. ...