Dynamics of the Oligocene cryosphere: mid-to-high latitude climate variability and ice sheet stability

The sensitivity of global climate to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels is one of the biggest issues currently facing humanity. Quantifying the sensitivity of the Earth's climate system to changes in CO2 levels in the geologic past is one way of reducing the uncertainty in future climate predictions. If man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions to the atmosphere follow projected rates, by 2100 concentrations will reach values not seen on Earth since the Oligocene epoch ~23 to 34 million years ago (Ma). Back then, geologists infer that Earth was warmer than today, featuring a genuinely green Greenland and a waxing and waning East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) that drove high amplitude sea level change (~40 m). These startling observations provide a powerful incentive to improve our understanding of the workings of that past climate system. The focus of this proposal is on an important, but understudied, interval of time (~26 to 28 Ma) for which published palaeoclimate records indicate the biggest repeated (100 thousand-year time scale) changes in Antarctic ice volume and high-latitude temperatures of the entire Oligocene epoch. Our proposed study will generate geological data to both test this interpretation of Oligocene high-latitude climate instability and further elucidate the nature of ice-sheet and temperature variability. Validation of the existence of dynamic Antarctic ice sheets, however, would present a major scientific problem because numerical analysis of ice sheet behavior suggests that, in the absence of big changes in CO2 levels, a large Antarctic ice sheet should be stable once formed because of strong hysteresis properties associated with ice sheet geometry. Several important questions are therefore raised: 1. How resilient were the early Antarctic ice sheets to CO2 change? 2. Do the numerical models give a false sense of the stability of both the Oligocene and, by extension, present day East Antarctic Ice Sheet? 3. Was Oligocene CO2 variability much greater than indicated in existing reconstructions? 4. Is it possible that ice sheets existed beyond Antarctica during the Oligocene? The main factor that has limited progress in tackling these questions has been a lack of suitable sedimentary sections on which to work. We propose to exploit new deep-sea sediment archives recovered from the Antarctic and Newfoundland margins during Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expeditions 318 and 342, respectively, on which our investigator team played significant roles (see Part 1, Case for Support). Our project will use (i) the Antarctic cores to test for the erosive products of dynamic behaviour (advance and retreat) on the East Antarctic margin, and (ii) the Newfoundland cores to test if high-latitude climatic conditions in the Northern Hemisphere were conducive to ice-sheet growth. Intriguingly, the drill cores from the Newfoundland margin contain abundant conspicuous angular sand sized lithic fragments that have been interpreted to be of ice-rafted origin-hinting at the presence of some form of nearby ice in the Oligocene. Our work will be accomplished through novel investigation of detrital isotope geochemistry on the Antarctic margin and application of organic geochemical temperature proxies in the high-latitude North Atlantic. Critical to our approach will be generation of high-resolution datasets that can be precisely dated and correlated to one another, as well as other high-resolution datasets around the globe.