EGU24-3128, updated on 08 Mar 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-3128
EGU General Assembly 2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Bølling-Allerød warming as a part of orbitally induced climate oscillation 

Yuchen Sun1, Xu Zhang2, Gregor Knorr1, Martin Werner1, Lev Tarasov3, and Gerrit Lohmann1,4
Yuchen Sun et al.
  • 1Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Paleo-dynamics, Bremerhaven, Germany (yuchen.sun@awi.de)
  • 2State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System, Resources and Environment (TPESRE), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China
  • 3Department of Physics and Physical Oceanography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada
  • 4Physics Department, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

Deglacial abrupt warming event is a ubiquitous feature of deglaciations during the Late Pleistocene. Nevertheless, during the last deglaciation an unusually early onset of abrupt Northern Hemisphere warming event, known as Bølling/Allerød (B/A) warming, complicates our understanding of their underlying dynamics, especially due to the large uncertainty in histories of ice sheet retreat and meltwater distributions. Here applying the latest reconstruction of ice sheet and meltwater flux, we conduct a set of transient climate experiments to investigate the triggering mechanism of the B/A warming. We find that the realistic spatial distribution of meltwater flux can stimulate the warming even under a persistent meltwater background. Our sensitivity experiments further show that its occurrence is associated with an orbitally induced climate self-oscillation under the very deglacial climate background related to atmospheric CO2 level and ice sheet configurations. Furthermore, the continuous atmospheric CO2 rising and ice sheet retreating appear to mute the oscillation by freshening the North Atlantic via modulating moisture transport by the Westerly. 

How to cite: Sun, Y., Zhang, X., Knorr, G., Werner, M., Tarasov, L., and Lohmann, G.: Bølling-Allerød warming as a part of orbitally induced climate oscillation , EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-3128, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-3128, 2024.