Radiocarbon evidence for the stability of polar ocean overturning during the Holocene

• Main Authors: Chen, T, Robinson, LF, Li, T, Burke, A, Zhang, X, Stewart, JA, White, NJ, Knowles, TDJ
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Springer Science and Business Media LLC 2023
• Subjects: 37 Earth Sciences; 3708 Oceanography; 3709 Physical Geography and Environmental Geoscience; 3705 Geology; 14 Life Below Water; Antarctic; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Drake Passage; Reykjanes; Antarc*; Antarctica; Iceland; North Atlantic Deep Water; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/355054

Acknowledgements: We thank the cruise members of RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer cruises 0805 and 1103, as well as Celtic Explorer cruise CE0806, for supporting the deep-sea coral sampling. T.C. acknowledges support from the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB40010200), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (020614380116) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (41991325, 41822603 and 42021001). L.F.R. acknowledges support from the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/S001743/1, NE/R005117/1, NE/N003861/1 and NE/X00127X/1). <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Proxy-based studies have linked the pre-industrial atmospheric <jats:inline-formula><jats:alternatives><jats:tex-math>$$p_{{\rm{CO}}_{2}}$$</jats:tex-math> p CO 2 </jats:alternatives></jats:inline-formula> rise of ∼20 ppmv in the mid- to late Holocene to an inferred increase in the Southern Ocean overturning and associated biogeochemical changes. However, the history of polar ocean overturning and ventilation through the Holocene remains poorly constrained, leaving important gaps in the assessment of the feedbacks between changes in ocean circulation and the carbon cycle in a warm climate state. The deep-ocean radiocarbon content, which provides a measure of ventilation, responds to circulation changes on centennial to millennial time scales. Here we present absolutely dated deep-sea coral radiocarbon records from the Drake Passage, between South America and Antarctica, and Reykjanes Ridge, south of Iceland, over the Holocene. Our data suggest that ventilation in the Antarctic circumpolar waters and North Atlantic Deep Water is surprisingly invariant within proxy uncertainties at our sampling resolution. Our findings indicate that long-term, large-scale polar ocean overturning has not been disturbed to a level resolvable by radiocarbon and is probably not responsible for the millennial atmosphere ...