Author ORCID Identifier
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-13-2024
Abstract
Understanding the causes of the ~90 ppmv atmospheric CO2 swings between glacial and interglacial climates is an important open challenge in paleoclimate research. Although the regularity of the glacial-interglacial cycles hints at a single driving mechanism, Earth System models require many independent physical and biological processes to explain the full observed CO2 signal. Here we show that biologically sequestered carbon in the ocean can explain an atmospheric CO2 change of 75 ± 40 ppmv, based on a mass balance calculation using published carbon isotopic measurements. An analysis of the carbon isotopic signatures of different water masses indicates similar regenerated carbon inventories at the Last Glacial Maximum and during the Holocene, requiring that the change in carbon storage was dominated by disequilibrium. We attribute the inferred change in carbon disequilibrium to expansion of seaice or change in the overturning circulation.
Keywords
carbon cycle, palaeoceanography, palaeoclimate
Language
English
Publication Title
Nature Communications
Rights
©The Author(s) 2024. This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Omta, A.W., Follett, C.L., Lauderdale, J.M. et al. Carbon isotope budget indicates biological disequilibrium dominated ocean carbon storage at the Last Glacial Maximum. Nat Commun 15, 8006 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-52360-z
Manuscript Version
Final Publisher Version