1,2,1,4,5,2,6,- 1School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom
- 2University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
- 3Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
- 4Institut des Géosciences de l'Environnement, Grenoble, France
- 5University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
- 6British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, United Kingdom
- *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract
Marine productivity in the Southern Ocean is thought to exert a key control on atmospheric CO2 concentrations in the past, present, and likely into the future. However, understanding how marine productivity responds to changes in ice sheet size and sea ice extent is challenging due to the limits of the observational record and the sensitivity of marine sediment core paleo-productivity records to the frontal shifts which accompany major climate changes. Sulfur isotopes in Antarctic ice cores provide a valuable new means of reconstructing past changes in Southern Ocean productivity as they enable the quantification of the contribution of different sulfate sources through isotope mass balance. Marine biological productivity is the major source of sulfate to the Antarctic ice sheet, and quantifying how that source has varied through time allows for a regionally integrated record of Southern Ocean primary productivity. Here we apply this method over the Super-Interglacial MIS31 and contrast it with more recent interglacials to investigate the response of Southern Ocean primary productivity to higher temperatures and a collapsed West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Jack D. Humby6, Dieter Tetzner6, Emma Fisher6, Manon Jones6, Sarah Jackson5, Geunwoo Lee5, Emilia Bushrod-Hicks6, Zelna Weich6, James Veale6, Giulia Sinnl6, Charlotte Phillips6,7, Chiara Giorio7, Madeleine Lewis6,8, Amy King6, Siwan Davies9, Remi Dallmayr10, Elise Fourre11, Elisa K. Conrad10, Azzurra Spagnesi12, Enrico Biscaro12,13, Marco Roman12, Chuanxin Gu7, Tobi Kolawole7, Alexander Zherebker7, Shaun Miller6, Dorothea Moser6, Andrea Spolaor13, Elena Barbaro13, Florian Ritterbusch14, Clara Baumbusch14, David Wachs14, Jonas Wöhrl14, Sophie Spelsberg5, Melanie Behrens10, Maria Hörhold10, Frank Wilhelms10, William Hutchinson1 7. Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, UK 8. University of Bristol, UK 9. Swansea University, UK 10. Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, DE 11. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, FR 12. Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, IT 13. National Research Council Institute of Polar Sciences, Venice, IT 14. Heidelberg University, DE 15. University of Göttingen, Geoscience Center, Göttingen, DE
How to cite: Burke, A., Sun, Y.-J., Prabhat, P., Rhodes, R., Hansson, M., Yang, M., Sugden, P., Innes, H., Pryer, H., Savarino, J., Fischer, H., Wolff, E., and Thomas, L. and the Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice Core Impurities CFA Team: Southern Ocean Marine Productivity across the Super-Interglacial MIS31 Reconstructed from Sulfur Isotopes from the Beyond EPICA Ice Core, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-20717, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-20717, 2026.
