Little glacial/interglacial net change in Southern Ocean bioproductivity over termination II - an integrated sulfate isotope ice core perspective

Glacial export productivity in the glacial Southern Ocean may have been enhanced due to iron fertilization from aeolian dust input. Marine sediments indicate such a glacial increase north of the modern Antarctic Polar Front but reduced biogenic activity and reduced nitrogen supply by upwelled deep waters south of it. Due to the sparsity of Southern Ocean sediment data, deriving an overall estimate of marine productivity changes is, however, difficult to achieve. Due to their larger spatial footprint, additional information on basin-wide productivity changes can be obtained from marine biogenic aerosol tracers in Antarctic ice cores.

We use SO₄^2- concentrations and its sulfur isotopic composition as well as other geochemical tracers in the EPICA Dronning Maud Land (EDML) ice core in the Atlantic Sector of the Southern Ocean (AS-SO) to provide the first complete glacial/interglacial source decomposition of total SO₄^2- from the penultimate glacial to the last glacial inception. Our isotopic source decomposition shows that despite other (e.g. terrestrial) sources being significant contributors to total SO₄^2- during glacial times, biogenic SO₄^2- production is always the dominant source at EDML. Using information on recent dimethylsulfide emissions and aerosol forward modeling, we can show that biogenic sulfate recorded in the EDML ice core is derived from the AS-SO south of 35°S but the major source lies south of 50°S, i.e., mainly the seasonal sea ice zone. During the penultimate glacial these sources shifted about 4° northward in parallel to sea ice expansion.

Taking reduced wet deposition of biogenic sulfate aerosol during glacial times into account, we can show that the biogenic sulfate production during the Penultimate Glacial Maximum and the Last Interglacial integrated over the AS-SO may have been only slightly higher in the penultimate glacial and differed by less than 15%. We see millennial biogenic sulfur changes of the same order during the Last Interglacial, which we attribute to temporal changes in the seasonal sea ice zone. An early interglacial productivity minimum in our biogenic sulfate record parallels within age uncertainties features previously reported in the literature, i.e., a minimum in winter, thus seasonal, sea ice extent, a stagnation event in Antarctic Bottom Water and a maximum in summer surface temperature encountered during the early LIG.