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Edited by Jean Jouzel, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de L’Environ, Orme des Merisiers, France, and approved October 4, 2018 (received for review February 11, 2018)
Significance
Paleoclimatic proxy records from Greenland ice cores show that the last glacial interval was punctuated by abrupt climatic transitions called Dansgaard–Oeschger (DO) events. These events are characterized by temperature increases over Greenland of up to
Abstract
The last glacial interval experienced abrupt climatic changes called Dansgaard–Oeschger (DO) events. These events manifest themselves as rapid increases followed by slow decreases of oxygen isotope ratios in Greenland ice core records. Despite promising advances, a comprehensive theory of the DO cycles, with their repeated ups and downs of isotope ratios, is still lacking. Here, based on earlier hypotheses, we introduce a dynamical model that explains the DO variability by rapid retreat and slow regrowth of thick ice shelves and thin sea ice in conjunction with changing subsurface water temperatures due to insulation by the ice cover. Our model successfully reproduces observed features of the records, such as the sawtooth shape of the DO cycles, waiting times between DO events across the last glacial, and the shifted antiphase relationship between Greenland and Antarctic ice cores. Our results show that these features can be obtained via internal feedbacks alone. Warming subsurface waters could have also contributed to the triggering of Heinrich events. Our model thus offers a unified framework for explaining major features of multimillennial climate variability during glacial intervals.
- millennial climate variability
- nonlinear climate modeling
- north–south seesaw
- Bayesian parameter estimation
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: boers{at}pik-potsdam.de.
Author contributions: N.B. designed research; N.B. performed research; N.B., M.G., and D.-D.R. analyzed data; and N.B. wrote the paper with contributions from M.G. and D.-D.R.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1802573115/-/DCSupplemental.
Published under the PNAS license.
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Ocean circulation, ice shelf, and sea ice interactions explain Dansgaard–Oeschger cycles
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