Article on the significance of the deep Southern Ocean on CO2 release since the end of the last glacial published in “Science”
Dr. Henning Fröllje, member of the Geochemistry & Hydrogeology group, and his former colleagues from the Max-Planck research group for Marine Isotope Geochemistry of the University of Oldenburg and the AWI Bremerhaven have recently published an article in the journal “Science“, which investigates the role of the deep Southern Ocean on natural CO2 fluctuations during the last 30,000 years. The authors report a stratification of water masses in the deep South Pacific during the Last Glacial Maximum about 20,000 years ago. They further show that breakdown of this stratification approximately 18,000 years ago was controlled by Southern Hemisphere climate and contributed to the release of CO2 from the deep ocean to the atmosphere. The study is based on the investigation of isotope ratios of the rare earth element neodymium, analyzed in fossil fish teeth and bone fragments, which the authors extracted from South Pacific sediment cores. Neodymium isotopes can be used to determine the origin of water masses, since they are characteristic for waters of different oceans. Using sedimentary fish and bone fragments the isotopic signature of waters at the time of their deposition can be investigated and thus used to reconstruct water mass mixing and stratification in the past. „Break-up of last glacial deep stratification in the South Pacific”, Chandranath Basak, Henning Fröllje, Frank Lamy, Rainer Gersonde, Verena Benz, Robert F. Anderson, Mario Molina-Kescher, Katharina Pahnke, Science 359, S. 900, doi: 10.1126/science.aao2473
Further informations:
Henning Fröllje
Phone: 0421-218-65116
e-Mail: froellje@uni-bremen.de
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6378/900