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EOS, TRANSACTIONS AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION, VOL. 87, NO. 21, doi:10.1029/2006EO210001, 2006

Santa Barbara Basin Study Extends Global Climate Record

Sarah Hopkins

Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

James Kennett

Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Craig Nicholson

Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Dorothy Pak

Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Christopher Sorlien

Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Richard Behl

California State University, Long Beach, USA

William Normark

U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif., USA

Ray Sliter

U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif., USA

Tessa Hill

University of California, Davis, USA

Arndt Schimmelmann

Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

Kevin Cannariato

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

Abstract

A fundamental goal of Earth science is to understand the remarkable instability of late Quarternary global climate prior to the beginning of the Holocene, about 11,000 years ago. This unusual climate behavior was characterized by millennial-scale climate oscillations on suborbital timescales, and a distinctive ‘Sawtooth’ pattern of very abrupt glacial and stadial terminations (within decades) followed by more gradual global cooling [e.g., Dansgaard et al., 1993; Hendy and Kennett, 1999]. The fact that both major (glacial) and minor (stadial) cooling periods in Earth's climate were terminated by similar abrupt warming episodes suggests a common mechanism driving such rapid changes in global climate. Understanding the causes of this instability is crucial given developing concerns about global warming, yet knowledge about this climate behavior has been essentially confined to the last 150,000 years or so, owing to the absence of available sequences of sufficient age and chronological resolution. The high-resolution paleoclimate record from the Greenland ice cores is limited to about 110 thousand years ago (ka), and although Antarctic ice cores now extend back to more than 740 ka [European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica, 2004], these latter cores primarily provide information about high-latitude conditions at much lower resolution than is required to address abrupt climate change.

Published 23 May 2006.

Index Terms: 0473 Biogeosciences: Paleoclimatology and paleoceanography (3344, 4900); 1605 Global Change: Abrupt/rapid climate change (4901, 8408); 3045 Marine Geology and Geophysics: Seafloor morphology, geology, and geophysics.

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Citation: Hopkins, S., et al. (2006), Santa Barbara Basin Study Extends Global Climate Record, Eos Trans. AGU, 87(21), doi:10.1029/2006EO210001.

Copyright 2006 by the American Geophysical Union.