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Persistent orbital influence on millennial climate variability through the Pleistocene

Nature Geoscience volume 14, pages 812–818 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Abundant evidence from marine, ice-core and terrestrial records demonstrates that Earth’s climate has experienced co-evolution of orbital- and millennial-scale variability through the Pleistocene. The varying magnitude of millennial climate variability (MCV) was linked to orbitally paced glacial cycles over the past 800 kyr. Before this interval, global glaciations were less pronounced but more frequent, yet scarcity of a long-term integration of high-resolution continental and marine records hampers our understanding of the evolution and dynamics of MCV before the mid-Pleistocene transition. Here we present a synthesis of four centennial-resolved elemental time series, which we interpret as proxies for MCV, from North Atlantic, Iberian margin, Balkan Peninsula (Lake Ohrid) and Chinese Loess Plateau. The proxy records reveal that MCV was pervasive and persistent over the mid-latitude Northern Hemisphere during the past 1.5 Myr. Our results suggest that the magnitude of MCV is not only strongly modulated by glacial boundary conditions on Earth after the mid-Pleistocene transition, but also persistently influenced by variations in precession and obliquity through the Pleistocene. The combination of these four proxies into a new MCV stack offers a credible reference for further assessing the dynamical interactions between orbital and millennial climate variability.

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Fig. 1: Locations of four centennial-resolved terrestrial and marine records.
Fig. 2: Comparison of four climate-sensitive elemental ratios with GL loess grain size and benthic δ18O stack.
Fig. 3: High-frequency (<9 kyr) components and their standard deviations of four elemental proxies.
Fig. 4: Wavelet-coherence spectra of four standard deviations with LR04 stack and ETP.
Fig. 5: Co-evolution of orbital- and millennial-scale climate variability over the past 1.5 Myr.

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Data availability

The elemental data that support the findings of this research are provided in Extended Data files and in the East Asian Paleoenvironmental Science Database (https://doi.org/10.12262/IEECAS.EAPSD2021001). Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

We thank X. K. Qiang and H. Zhao for conducting palaeomagnetic measurement, H. M. Fan, Y. Li, L. J. Liang, H. Wang, Y. Wang, Y. Yan, J. B. Zhao and M. Zhao for field and laboratory assistance and H. L. Zhao and C. Y. Rui for data analysis. The elemental data of IODP sites U1308 and U1385 were provided by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) (http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo). This work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation of China (no. 41525008) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (nos. XDB40000000 and 132B61KYSB20170005). The contribution of J.F.M. was supported in part by the US-NSF. X.Z. was supported by grant from the National Science Foundation of China (no. 42075047).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an, China

    Youbin Sun, Fei Guo, Ting Wang, Xingxing Liu & Zhisheng An

  2. CAS Center for Excellence in Quaternary Science and Global Change, Xi’an, China

    Youbin Sun, Xingxing Liu & Zhisheng An

  3. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY, USA

    Jerry F. McManus

  4. Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Steven C. Clemens

  5. Group of Alpine Paleoecology and Human Adaptation (ALPHA), State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System, Resources and Environment (TPESRE), Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xu Zhang

  6. Key Laboratory of Western China’s Environmental Systems (Ministry of Education), College of Earth and Environmental Science, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China

    Xu Zhang

  7. Institute of Geological Sciences and Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Hendrik Vogel

  8. Godwin Laboratory for Palaeoclimate Research, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    David A. Hodell

  9. College of Earth Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Fei Guo & Ting Wang

  10. Open Studio for Oceanic-Continental Climate and Environment Changes, Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao, China

    Zhisheng An

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Contributions

Y.S. and Z.A. designed the study and initiated the loess drilling project. Y.S., J.F.M., S.C.C., X.Z., H.V., D.H. and Z.A. coordinated the interpretations of proxy data. F.G., T.W. and X.L. contributed to XRF scanning of loess samples and spectral analyses. D.H. contributed the XRF scanning data from the marine cores. All authors participated in discussion and interpretation of the data and provided comments and suggestions for the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Youbin Sun.

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Peer review information Nature Geoscience thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: James Super.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Correlation of glacial/interglacial transitions and abrupt events in marine and continental records.

a, Chinese cave δ18O record13; (b) Si/Sr of IOPD Site U130812; (c) Ca/Ti of IODP Site U138539; (d) K counts of Lake Ohrid sediment40; and (e) Fe/K of Gulang loess. Blue dashed lines denote rapid glacial/interglacial transitions, and green dashed lines indicate abrupt climate events. Blue diamonds and green dots indicate the first-order and second-order time controls, respectively.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Age models of four centennial-resolved records.

First-order time controls (blue diamonds) denote glacial/interglacial transitions inferred from absolutely dated Chinese speleothem13 and globally stacked benthic δ18O records36. Second-order time controls (green dots) are derived from the timings of weak monsoon events in Chinese Speleothem13 and IRD events in IODP Site U130812. Paleomagnetic boundaries (red triangles) of these four records are also shown for comparison (B/M-Brunhes/Matuyama transition, TJ-Top Jaramillo, BT-Bottom Jaramillo, and CM-Cobb Mountain).

Extended Data Fig. 3 Spectral results of four elemental ratios and cave δ18O.

a, Spectral density of U1308 Si/Sr, U1385 Ca/Ti, and cave δ18O; (b) Spectral density of LO Ca/K, GL Fe/K, and cave δ18O. Grey bars denote millennial peaks above the 90% confidence level (red dashed lines).

Extended Data Fig. 4 Wavelet spectra of high-frequency components and standard deviations (s.d.) of four elemental ratios.

a, Power spectra of high-frequency components of U1308 Si/Sr, U1385 Ca/Ti, LO Ca/K, and GL Fe/K; (b) Power spectra of U1308 Si/Sr-s.d., U1385 Ca/Ti-s.d., LO Ca/K-s.d. and GL Fe/K-s.d. Black contours indicate the 5% significance level against red noise.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Cross-spectral comparison of the s.d. of four elemental ratios with LR04 stack and ETP.

Spectral results (brown) of the STDs of (a) U1308 Si/Sr-s.d. (b) U1385 Ca/Ti-s.d. (c) LO Ca/K-s.d. (d) GL Fe/K-s.d. and their coherency spectra vs. LR04 stack36 (blue) and ETP48 (pink). Spectral density is normalized and plotted on a log scale. Grey bars indicate dominant orbital peaks at the 100-, 41-, 23- and 19-kyr periods. Coherence spectra are plotted above 80% confidence level.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Correlation of abrupt climate events in MCV stack with cave δ18O record13 and synthetic Greenland temperature49.

Detection of abrupt climate events is based on their amplitude (>average deviation) and duration (>0.8 kyr) of high-frequency components of these three records. Light blue bars and pink numbers refer to interglacial marine isotope stages.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 2

Elemental data of U1308, U1385, Lake Ohrid and GL loess.

Source Data Fig. 3

High-frequency components and s.d. of four elemental proxies.

Source Data Fig. 5

MCV stack, speleothem δ180 and Greenland temperature.

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Sun, Y., McManus, J.F., Clemens, S.C. et al. Persistent orbital influence on millennial climate variability through the Pleistocene. Nat. Geosci. 14, 812–818 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00794-1

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