Remineralization dominating the δ13 C decrease in the mid-depth Atlantic during the last deglaciation

• Published in: Earth and Planetary Science Letters
• Main Authors: Gu, Sifan, Liu, Zhengyu, Oppo, Delia W., Lynch-Stieglitz, Jean, Jahn, Alexandra, Zhang, Jiaxu, Lindsay, Keith, Wu, Lixin
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Elsevier 2021
• Subjects: δ13 C; Water mass composition; Remineralization; End-member; HS1; Lynch; NADW; North Atlantic Deep Water; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/27703

© The Author(s), 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Gu, S., Liu, Z., Oppo, D. W., Lynch-Stieglitz, J., Jahn, A., Zhang, J., Lindsay, K., & Wu, L. Remineralization dominating the δ13 C decrease in the mid-depth Atlantic during the last deglaciation. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 571, (2021): 117106, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2021.117106. δ 13 C records from the mid-depth Atlantic show a pronounced decrease during the Heinrich Stadial 1 (HS1), a deglacial episode of dramatically weakened Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC). Proposed explanations for this mid-depth decrease include a greater fraction of δ 13 C -depleted southern sourced water (SSW), a δ 13 C decrease in the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) end-member, and accumulation of the respired organic carbon. However, the relative importance of these proposed mechanisms cannot be quantitatively constrained from current available observations alone. Here we diagnose the individual contributions to the deglacial Atlantic mid-depth δ 13 C change from these mechanisms using a transient simulation with carbon isotopes and idealized tracers. We find that although the fraction of the low- δ 13 C SSW increases in response to a weaker AMOC during HS1, the water mass mixture change only plays a minor role in the mid-depth Atlantic δ 13 C decrease. Instead, increased remineralization due to the AMOC-induced mid-depth ocean ventilation decrease is the dominant cause. In this study, we differentiate between the deep end-members, which are assigned to deep water regions used in previous paleoceanography studies, and the surface end-members, which are from the near-surface water defined from the physical origin of deep water masses. We find that the deep NADW end-member includes additional remineralized material accumulated when sinking from the surface (surface NADW end-member). Therefore, the surface end-members should be used in diagnosing ...