Subtropical Arctic Ocean temperatures during the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum

By A. Sluijs, S. Schouten, M. Pagani, M. Woltering, H. Brinkhuis, J. Damsté, G. Dickens, Matthew Huber, G. Reichart, R. Stein and 5 more. Nature, 2006

704 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum, ∼55 million years ago, was a brief period of widespread, extreme climatic warming, that was associated with massive atmospheric greenhouse gas input. Although aspects of the resulting environmental changes are well documented at low latitudes, no data were available to quantify simultaneous changes in the Arctic region. Here we identify the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum in a marine sedimentary sequence obtained during the Arctic Coring Expedition. We show that sea surface temperatures near the North Pole increased from ∼18 °C to over 23 °C during this event. Such warm values imply the absence of ice and thus exclude the influence of ice-albedo feedbacks on this Arctic warming. At the same time, sea level rose while anoxic and euxinic conditions developed in the ocean's bottom waters and photic zone, respectively. Increasing temperature and sea level match expectations based on palaeoclimate model simulations, but the absolute polar temperatures that we derive before, during and after the event are more than 10 °C warmer than those model-predicted. This suggests that higher-than-modern greenhouse gas concentrations must have operated in conjunction with other feedback mechanisms—perhaps polar stratospheric clouds or hurricane-induced ocean mixing—to amplify early Palaeogene polar temperatures.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Geology, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d734e1309657a59c7f8d8196eca93d969bb5174d

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In Atmospheric Science

1. A. Ridgwell
2. Dorian S. Abbot
3. Nancy Knowlton
4. Dan Lunt
5. Mark Bush
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In Geology

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In Oceanography

1. Stefan Schouten
2. Nancy Knowlton
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4. Paul Valdes
5. K. Roy
6. A. P. Allen
7. A. Ridgwell
8. E. Hopmans

Citations in the corpus

• Orbital pacing of methane hydrate destabilization during the Palaeogene (2011, background): “With the exception of TEX86-derived estimates of extreme warmth in the Arctic ocean”
• A high‐latitude convective cloud feedback and equable climates (2008, background): “E-mail: abbot@fas.harvard.edu the North Pole was as high as 23 °C during the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) (∼55 Ma) and 15–18 °C throughout the early Paleogene (Moran et al., 2006; Sluijs et al., 2006).”
• Evolution and the latitudinal diversity gradient: speciation, extinction and biogeography. (2007, background): “2), especially the mid Palaeocene to early Eocene (59–50 Ma), with warm (> 18 °C) surface waters extending to the arctic and a much reduced equator-to-pole temperature gradient (Sluijs et al. 2006).”
• The organic geochemistry of glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether lipids: A review (2013, background): “, 2006), suggesting no polar amplification of warming (Sluijs et al., 2006).”
• Modelling the oxygen isotope distribution of ancient seawater using a coupled ocean–atmosphere GCM: Implications for reconstructing early Eocene climate (2010, background): “, 2007); the Arctic (Sluijs et al., 2006) and New Zealand (Hollis et al.”