New Climate Model Explains Ice-Age Variability

High-resolution paleodata

In or­der to sup­port these find­ings of the mod­els, the sci­ent­ists in­vest­ig­ated the sea-sur­face tem­per­at­ures for that time period. “To do this, we com­piled and ana­lyzed all of the high-res­ol­u­tion re­con­struc­tions from mar­ine sed­i­ments of the North At­lantic," says Dr. Lu­kas Jonkers, co-au­thor of the study and mi­cro­pa­le­on­to­lo­gist at MARUM. “High-res­ol­u­tion here means that the data points of a series av­er­age no more than 200 years apart, with no single step greater than 1000 years.” The pa­leoarchives stud­ied provide evid­ence for re­cur­ring tem­per­at­ure os­cil­la­tions in the sur­face wa­ters every 150 to 1000 years dur­ing the last gla­cial max­imum, which is con­sist­ent with the mod­elled multi-centen­nial cli­mate vari­ab­il­ity with in­ternal for­cing mech­an­isms.

The importance of understanding feedback processes

Re­cent re­search find­ings un­der­score the im­port­ance of de­tailed study and un­der­stand­ing of feed­back pro­cesses in the cli­mate sys­tem. Mat­thias Prange em­phas­izes the need for a deeper un­der­stand­ing of cli­mate vari­ab­il­ity at vari­ous time scales, as this could have rami­fic­a­tions for fu­ture cli­mate change that could lead to un­ex­pec­ted and un­desir­able sur­prises for so­ci­et­ies. These find­ings are also in­cor­por­ated into the work of the Cluster of Ex­cel­lence "The Ocean Floor – Earth’s Un­charted In­ter­face", which is based at MARUM.

Reference: Prange M, Jonkers L, Merkel U, Schulz M, Bakker P. A multicentennial mode of North Atlantic climate variability throughout the Last Glacial Maximum. Sci Adv. 2023;9(44):eadh1106. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adh1106

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