Northward shift of the southern westerlies during the Antarctic Cold Reversal

• Published in: Quaternary Science Reviews
• Main Authors: Fletcher, Michael-Shawn, Pedro, Joel, Hall, Tegan, Mariani, Michela, Alexander, Joseph, Beck, Kristen K., Blaauw, Maarten, Hodgson, Dominic, Heijnis, Henk, Gadd, Patricia S., Lise-Pronovost, Agathe
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2021
• Subjects: F640 Earth Science; F860 Climatology; F643 Quaternary studies; F642 Geoscience; Antarctic; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Antarc*; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/id/eprint/46616/; https://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/id/eprint/46616/1/JQSR-D-21-00382_R1_Manuscript_prepublication%20for%20Repository.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2021.107189

Inter-hemispheric asynchrony of climate change through the last deglaciation has been theoretically linked to latitudinal shifts in the southern westerlies via their influence over CO2 out-gassing from the Southern Ocean. Proxy-based reconstructions disagree on the behaviour of the westerlies through this interval. The last deglaciation was interrupted in the Southern Hemisphere by the Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR; 14.7 to 13.0 ka BP (thousand years Before Present)), a millennial-scale cooling event that coincided with the BøllingeAllerød warm phase in the North Atlantic (BA; 14.7 to 12.7 ka BP). We present terrestrial proxy palaeoclimate data that demonstrate a migration of the westerlies during the last deglaciation. We support the hypothesis that wind-driven out-gassing of old CO2 from the Southern Ocean drove the deglacial rise in atmospheric CO2.