the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Evaluating seasonal sea-ice cover over the Southern Ocean at the Last Glacial Maximum
Laurie Menviel
Katrin J. Meissner
Xavier Crosta
Deepak Chandan
Gerrit Lohmann
W. Richard Peltier
Xiaoxu Shi
Jiang Zhu
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During the last ice age, Northern Hemisphere ice sheets reshaped global climate. They shifted North Atlantic winds southward, increasing summer rainfall across Eurasia. They also altered tropical and Southern Hemisphere weather patterns, affecting rainfall far beyond the ice-covered regions. Our results show that the height and shape of the ice sheets had a much greater influence on global wind and rainfall patterns than changes in Earth’s orbit, greenhouse gases, or surface reflectivity.
For 1 century, the hemispheric summer insolation is proposed as a key pacemaker of astronomical climate change. However, an increasing number of geologic records reveal that the low-latitude hydrological cycle shows asynchronous precessional evolutions that are very often out of phase with the summer insolation. Here, we propose that the astronomically driven low-latitude hydrological cycle is not paced by summer insolation but by shifting perihelion.
Our study examines the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), a period with higher tidal dissipation. Despite increased tidal mixing, our model simulations show that the AMOC remained relatively shallow, consistent with paleoproxy data and resolving previous inconsistencies between proxy data and model simulations. This research highlights the importance of strong ocean stratification during the LGM and its interaction with tidal mixing.