Hydrological and temperature change in Arctic Siberia during the intensification of Northern Hemisphere Glaciation
Introduction
The Pliocene was a global warm period 5.332–2.588 million yr ago (Ma) (Gibbard et al., 2010) when atmospheric carbon dioxide (pCO2) was 350–450 ppm (Zhang et al., 2013, Martínez-Botí et al., 2015), and it has been proposed as an analog for future warming (Thompson and Fleming, 1996). Of particular interest is the intensification of Northern Hemisphere glaciation (iNHG) ∼2.73 Ma, during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) G6, which has been studied in many high-latitude marine records (Fig. 1) (e.g. Haug et al., 2005, Naafs et al., 2012, Hennissen et al., 2015, Bailey et al., 2013, Kleiven et al., 2002, Martínez-Garcia et al., 2010). Northern landmasses were permanently altered by the growth of large ice sheets after iNHG, yet few terrestrial records from this period have been studied. Unfortunately, high-resolution, continuous terrestrial sections of Pliocene age are rare in the high latitudes. Pleistocene glaciations repeatedly scoured the continents, precluding the uninterrupted deposition of sediment necessary to develop a continuous view of terrestrial Arctic climate change since the Pliocene (Miller et al., 2010).
In 2009, a sediment core from Lake El'gygytgyn, Russia, spanning the last ∼3.6 Ma was recovered. This record provides a unique view of environmental change preceding, during, and following iNHG. Although pollen-based temperature estimates have been published for Lake El'gygytgyn (Melles et al., 2012, Brigham-Grette et al., 2013), these are regional in nature and potentially subject to large errors based on the modern analogue approach (Andreev et al., 2014). Organic geochemical proxies provide an independent means of examining terrestrial temperature and hydrological change (e.g. Weijers et al., 2007a, Pautler et al., 2014) and may provide a more local signal in a lacustrine environment (Buckles et al., 2014). Here we apply two such proxies that have previously been used to reconstruct past Arctic temperature from marine and lacustrine sediments (e.g. de Wet et al., 2016, Pautler et al., 2014). Firstly, we use the methylation/cyclization (MBT/CBT) ratio based on branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs) (Weijers et al., 2007b, Peterse et al., 2012). Secondly, we measure the deuterium to hydrogen ratio on terrestrial higher plant leaf waxes (n-alkane δ2H, δD, or δDwax) (e.g. Sachse et al., 2012).
Section snippets
Study area and regional setting
Lake El'gygytgyn is located in northeastern Arctic Russia (67.5°N, 172°E, Fig. 1). A bolide impact created the lake, resulting in a small catchment with a high degree of topographic relief (Layer, 2000, Nolan and Brigham-Grette, 2007). The lake and its catchment are roughly circular, with diameters of ∼12 km and ∼18 km, respectively. The 175-meter deep lake is ice-covered for ∼10 months of the year, with most inflow during the early June freshet, delivered by 50 small creeks around the
Sample preparation
Sediment samples were collected at one-centimeter intervals from the working half of each core section where possible, and the archive half where necessary. For this study, we analyzed samples every ∼10 cm throughout the composite core, resulting in a climate reconstruction with ∼2 kyr resolution from 2.82–2.41 Ma (mean sample spacing = 2.3 kyr, median = 1.3 kyr). Freeze-dried, homogenized samples were extracted using a Dionex accelerated solvent extraction (ASE 200) system with a mixture of
Results and discussion
In the following discussion, we make reference to the distinctive Lake El'gygytgyn sedimentary facies described in previous studies and the supplementary materials (Gebhardt et al., 2013, Brigham-Grette et al., 2013). The two facies of note are glacial facies A, a gray laminated facies thought to represent year-round lake ice cover, and super-interglacial facies C, a red laminated facies thought to represent extreme warmth and high autochthonous productivity (Gebhardt et al., 2013). We also
Conclusions
The Lake El'gygytgyn terrestrial sequence documenting the transition of high northern latitudes from the warm Pliocene into the frequently glaciated Pleistocene is the first of its kind. Our application of the MBT/CBT palaeotemperature proxy captures glacial–interglacial temperature variability during the Pliocene–Pleistocene transition, demonstrating the potential for long-term environmental reconstruction using brGDGTs in the terrestrial Arctic. Cooling and drying are inferred coincident with
Acknowledgments
B.A.K. thanks Helen Habicht and Greg de Wet for useful feedback and discussions. Jeff Salacup is acknowledged for technical laboratory assistance. Norbert Nowaczyk, Volker Wennrich, and Martin Melles provided the age model tie points. We thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor for providing detailed comments that improved the manuscript and figures. This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. 1204087, a NSF GRF to B.A.K. under Grant No. 1451512, and a Geological
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2019, Chemical GeologyCitation Excerpt :Meanwhile, the hydrogen isotopic compositions of soil water may reflect changes of δD in atmospheric precipitation and ground evaporation conditions (Barnes and Allison, 1983; Kendall and Caldwell, 1998; Tang and Feng, 2001; Darling, 2004). Therefore, the hydrogen isotopic values of terrestrial leaf waxes recovered from loess-paleosol deposits, lake sediments, and even marine deposits have been widely utilized for examining changes of past hydrological conditions (Castañeda and Schouten, 2011; Wang et al., 2013, 2018; Bird et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2017), particularly in tracing changes of precipitation δD and water vapor sources (Sachse et al., 2004; Hou et al., 2008, 2018; Liu and Yang, 2008; Rao et al., 2009; Feakins et al., 2016; Thomas et al., 2016a, 2016b; Keisling et al., 2017). Some studies have showed that precipitation δD is negatively correlated with the amount of precipitation (the so-called “amount effect”) (Dansgaard, 1964; Gasse, 2002; Vuille et al., 2005), and therefore, sedimentary leaf wax δD (δDwax) has been used to infer the amount variability for past precipitation (Schefuß et al., 2005; Tierney et al., 2008, 2017; Shanahan et al., 2015; Niedermeyer et al., 2016).
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2018, Organic GeochemistryCitation Excerpt :Following a review of about three hundred manuscripts where GDGTs were analyzed using SIM with QMS, we have found only a dozen manuscripts (ca. 4%) where m/z values are written with at least one decimal place (e.g., Herfort et al., 2006; Yang et al., 2011; Basse et al., 2014). In the other manuscripts, the m/z values are either systematically written as integer numbers (e.g., Cao et al., 2017; Freymond et al., 2017; Naafs et al., 2017), or not indicated at all (e.g., Keisling et al., 2017; Ruan et al., 2017; Woelders et al., 2017). This means that only a few manuscripts clearly reported exact m/z values rounded up to at least one decimal rather than approximate, integer m/z values for GDGT analysis using SIM.