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Direct astronomical influence on abrupt climate variability

Nature Geoscience volume 14, pages 819–826 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Changes in the magnitude of millennial-scale climate variability (MCV) during the Late Pleistocene occur as a function of changing background climate state over tens of thousands of years, an indirect consequence of slowly varying incoming solar radiation associated with changes in Earth’s orbit. However, whether astronomical forcing can stimulate MCV directly (without a change in the background state) remains to be determined. Here we use a comprehensive fully coupled climate model to demonstrate that orbitally driven insolation changes alone can give rise to spontaneous millennial-scale climate oscillations under intermediate glacial conditions. Our results demonstrate that an abrupt transition from warm interstadial to cold stadial conditions can be triggered directly by a precession-controlled increase in low-latitude boreal summer insolation and/or an obliquity-controlled decrease in high-latitude mean annual insolation, by modulating North Atlantic low-latitude hydroclimate and/or high-latitude sea ice–ocean–atmosphere interactions, respectively. Furthermore, contrasting insolation effects over the tropical versus subpolar North Atlantic, exerted by obliquity or precession, result in an oscillatory climate regime, even within an otherwise stable climate. With additional sensitivity experiments under different glacial–interglacial climate backgrounds, we synthesize a coherent theoretical framework for climate stability, elaborating the direct and indirect (dual) control by Earth’s orbital cycles on millennial-scale climate variability during the Pleistocene.

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Fig. 1: Relationship of millennial-scale climate activity with Earth’s orbit and G-IG cycles in the last 800 kyr.
Fig. 2: Orbitally induced AMOC oscillatory regime.
Fig. 3: Triggering dynamics of orbitally induced AMOC changes.
Fig. 4: Responses of the AMOC oscillatory regime to millennial-scale CO2 changes.
Fig. 5: Response of the AMOC oscillatory regime to varying intermediate glacial conditions.
Fig. 6: Conceptual framework for the AMOC oscillatory regime in the phase space of Earth’s orbit under different climate backgrounds.

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Data availability

The palaeoclimate records used in this paper are available at the following sources: ref. 2, benthic δ18O stack, https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.704257; ref. 37, CO2 data, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1002/2014GL061957/asset/supinfo/grl52461-sup-0003-supplementary.xls?v=1&s=e77ad89c3925111330671009ab40eac65e019d01; ref. 50, ODP983 NPS data, https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.904398. The model data that supports the key findings of this study are available in National Tibetan Plateau Data Center (TPDC) at https://doi.org/10.11888/Paleoenv.tpdc.271670.

Code availability

The standard model code of the ‘Community Earth System Models’ (COSMOS) version COSMOS-landveg r2413 (2009) is available upon request from the ‘Max Planck Institute for Meteorology’ in Hamburg (https://www.mpimet.mpg.de). Post-processing of the model output and model data analysis were performed with CDO (Climate Data Operators, version 1.9.5 and 1.9.10, https://code.mpimet.mpg.de/projects/cdo).

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Acknowledgements

We thank colleagues at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven for maintaining the supercomputer. The study is supported by the Basic Science Center for Tibetan Plateau Earth System (BSCTPES, NSFC project no. 41988101), the Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 42075047) and the German Helmholtz Postdoc Program (PD-301). We also acknowledge financial support from UK NERC (grants nos. NE/J008133/1 and NE/L006405/1) to S.B. and the German BMBF funded project PalMod (01LP1504A, 01LP1915A and 01LP1916B) and the PACES programme of the AWI to G.K. and G.L. A sabbatical visit by R.D. to AWI was financially supported by the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 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 & Fahu Chen

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

    Xu Zhang & Fahu Chen

  3. Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany

    Xu Zhang, Gregor Knorr & Gerrit Lohmann

  4. School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Stephen Barker

  5. MARUM-Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Gerrit Lohmann

  6. School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

    Russell Drysdale

  7. State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, CAS Center for Excellence in Quaternary Geology and Global changes, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an, China

    Youbin Sun

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

    David Hodell

Authors
  1. Xu Zhang
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  2. Stephen Barker
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  3. Gregor Knorr
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  4. Gerrit Lohmann
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  5. Russell Drysdale
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  6. Youbin Sun
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  7. David Hodell
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  8. Fahu Chen
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Contributions

X.Z. conceived and developed the research, and wrote the manuscript with help of S.B. and G.K. All authors contributed to the final version of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xu Zhang.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Geoscience thanks Pepijn Bakker and Sophia Hines for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor(s): James Super.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Climate characteristics of E40ka_CTL control run.

a, AMOC index in E40ka_CTL and its response to freshwater hosing (E40ka_FWF). The hosing lasts for 500 years, starting from the 0th year before which is the control experiment E40ka_CTL. b, c Mean annual SIC and barotropic stream function (SF, units: Sv) under 40ka BP conditions57. d, e same as b, c, but under the LGM boundary conditions (E40ka_CTL).

Extended Data Fig. 2 Oscillating dynamics in the scenario with varying (a-e, TRN40ka) and constant (f-j, E40ka_34kaOrb) orbital configurations.

a) and e) for AMOC index (units: Sv); b) and g) for sea surface temperature (units: °C), c) and h) for sea ice concentration (SIC, units: %), d) and i) for subsurface sea temperature (units: °C) in the key convection sites of the NA; e) and j) for meridional salt water transportation along 43°N (units: Sv) in the NA. We calculate the regional averages of SST, SIC and subsurface T in the northeastern NA (30°W-10°W, 50°-65°N). Bold lines show the 30-year running mean of the original data (thin grey lines). Bold lines show the 30-year running mean of the original data (thin grey lines). The short blue and red bold lines in (a) and (f) correspond to selected time intervals representing stadial and interstadial periods, respectively, which are used to calculate composite anomalies between strong and weak AMOC phases in Extended Data Fig. 3 and 7a, b. Note that length of these lines indicates length of time intervals.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Climate changes during stadial-to-interstadial transitions in TRN40ka (a-b) and E40ka_34kaOrb (c-d).

a, b Composite surface temperature anomalies between simulated strong and weak AMOC phases as indicated by short red and blue bold lines in Extended Data Fig. 3a, f. c, d, same as (a) and (b), but for precipitation. The dots represent qualitatively the corresponding changes in paleoclimate proxy records as shown in Extended Data Table 2 and 3.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Oscillating dynamics in the scenario with lowered eccentricity-modulated precession (a-e, E40ka_34kaEP) and obliquity (f-j, E40ka_34kaObl).

a) and e) for AMOC index (units: Sv); b) and g) for sea surface temperature (units: °C), c) and h) for sea ice concentration (SIC, units: %), d) and i) for subsurface sea temperature (units: °C) in the key convection sites of the NA; e) and j) for meridional salt water transportation along 43°N (units: Sv) in the NA. We calculate the regional averages of SST, SIC and subsurface T in the northeastern NA (30°W-10°W, 50°-65°N). Bold lines show the 30-year running mean of the original data (thin grey lines).

Extended Data Fig. 5 Triggering dynamics regarding lowered obliquity (a-c, E40ka_34kaObl) or eccentricity-modulated precession (d-i, E40ka_34kaEP).

a, b, c, Annual mean anomalies of surface air temperature (SAT, units: °C), SIC (shaded, units: %) and mixed layer depth (contour, units: m), and sea level pressure (SLP, contour, units: Pa), total net freshwater flux into the ocean (TNFWF, shaded, units: mm·day-1) and vertical integrated moisture transport (VIMT, vector, units: kg·m-1s-1) between the 100-year average before the onset of its initial transition into a weak AMOC phase in E40ka_34kaObl and that in the control run E40ka_CTL; d, e, f, same as a, b, c, but for annual mean anomalies between 40-year average before the onset of its initial transition into a weak AMOC phase in E40ka_34kaEP and that in E40ka_CTL; g, h, i, same as d, e, f, but for boreal summer mean anomalies.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Governing dynamics of precession-induced tropical NA hydroclimate changes.

a. Mean annual precipitation anomaly between high and low boreal summer insolation scenarios under LGM conditions in coupled model COSMOS. b – f. Mean annual precipitation anomalies of AGCM sensitivity runs in contrast to the AGCM control run (Methods, Extended Data Table 1).

Extended Data Fig. 7 Simulated AMOC states in the transient experiment under intermediate glacial conditions and equilibrium experiments under peak glacial and interglacial conditions.

a, b AMOC states in the composited weak and strong phases of oscillatory regime in TRN40ka, representing stadial and interstadial AMOC state. c, d, e, f are equilibrated AMOC states in orbital sensitivity runs under the LGM conditions. g, h, i, j same as c-f but under the pre-industrial conditions.

Extended Data Table 1 Model simulations in this study
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Temperature proxy data used for model-data comparison. Temperature proxy data used for model-data comparison
Full size table
Extended Data Table 3 Information regarding 23 reconstructed precipitation records used for model-data comparison
Full size table

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Zhang, X., Barker, S., Knorr, G. et al. Direct astronomical influence on abrupt climate variability. Nat. Geosci. 14, 819–826 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00846-6

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