title: Persistent 400,000-year variability of Antarctic ice volume and the carbon cycle is revealed throughout the Plio-Pleistocene.
abstract: Marine sediment records from the Oligocene and Miocene reveal clear 400,000-year climate cycles related to variations in orbital eccentricity. These cycles are also observed in the Plio-Pleistocene records of the global carbon cycle. However, they are absent from the Late Pleistocene ice-age record over the past 1.5 million years. Here we present a simulation of global ice volume over the past 5 million years with a coupled system of four three-dimensional ice-sheet models. Our simulation shows that the 400,000-year long eccentricity cycles of Antarctica vary coherently with δ(13)C data during the Pleistocene, suggesting that they drove the long-term carbon cycle changes throughout the past 35 million years. The 400,000-year response of Antarctica was eventually suppressed by the dominant 100,000-year glacial cycles of the large ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht (IMAU), Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: de Boer
authors.affiliation: Department of Earth Sciences, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, Budapestlaan 4, 3584 CD Utrecht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Lucas J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Lourens
authors.affiliation: Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht (IMAU), Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Roderik S W
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: van de Wal