Onset of climate change at Last Glacial-Holocene transition: Role of the tropical Pacific

We study palaeoclimatic records from various sites spread around the earth, focusing on the start of the last glacial-interglacial transition. The warming, as recorded in the $\delta^{18}O$ record started first in the tropics, then propagated to the Antarctic and then finally to the Arctic. Our anal...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sant, Dhananjay A, Rangarajan, Govindan
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: Indian Academy of Sciences 2002
Subjects:
Online Access:http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/12269/
http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/12269/1/sdarticle4.pdf
Description
Summary:We study palaeoclimatic records from various sites spread around the earth, focusing on the start of the last glacial-interglacial transition. The warming, as recorded in the $\delta^{18}O$ record started first in the tropics, then propagated to the Antarctic and then finally to the Arctic. Our analysis of the data suggests that it took about 7.6 ka for onset of climate change to propagate globally. We propose that the tropical Pacific played a major role in initiating the warming in the tropics. We discuss mechanisms that could have transported this heat from the tropics to Antarctica and then to the Arctic during transition to the interglacial.