HR: 08:15h
AN: PP21A-02 INVITED     [PDF]
TI: A Recurrent Super ENSO-Like Climate Pattern during the Holocene Affecting the Interbasinal Salinity Gradients
AU: * Stott, L D
EM: stott@usc.edu
AF: Department of Earth Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 United States
AU: Lund, S
EM: slund@usc.edu
AF: Department of Earth Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 United States
AU: Thunell, R
EM: thunell@geol.sc.edu
AF: Department of Geological Sciences, University of South Carolina 700 Sumter Street, Columbia, SC 29208 United States
AB: We present evidence that sea surface temperatures and salinities in the western Pacific have varied significantly over the past 15 thousand years on time scales of decades to millennia. Combining decadally resolved $\delta$18O and Mg/Ca measurements on pelagic carbonates we find SSTs between 6oN and 11oS in the western tropical Pacific were an average of 1oC warmer and ~1ppt saltier in the early Holocene and have decreased progressively through the Holocene. Superimposed on this long term trend were ~10 millennial length oscillations in temperature and salinity, the most recent coinciding with the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. The available evidence from sites in the Pacific and Atlantic suggests that these salinity oscillations involved sustained shifts in the mean position of the ITCZ that affected the transport of vapor between ocean basins and altered the salinity gradients between the basins, which maintain convective overturning in the North Atlantic.
DE: 3344 Paleoclimatology
DE: 3354 Precipitation (1854)
DE: 4215 Climate and interannual variability (3309)
DE: 4231 Equatorial oceanography
DE: 4522 El Ni¤o
SC: Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology [PP]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting