Response of the Pacific inter-tropical convergence zone to global cooling and initiation of Antarctic glaciation across the Eocene Oligocene Transition.

ABSTRACT: Approximately 34 million years ago across the Eocene-Oligocene transition (EOT), Earth's climate tipped from a largely unglaciated state into one that sustained large ice sheets on Antarctica. Antarctic glaciation is attributed to a threshold response to slow decline in atmospheric CO2 but our understanding of the feedback processes triggered and of climate change on the other contents is limited. Here we present new geochemical records of terrigenous dust accumulating on the sea floor across the EOT from a site in the central equatorial Pacific. We report a change in dust chemistry from an Asian affinity to a Central-South American provenance that occurs geologically synchronously with the initiation of stepwise global cooling, glaciation of Antarctica and aridification on the northern co

SUBMITTER: Hyeong K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4979033 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature