Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

Last Glacial to Holocene Dust Changes at Talos Dome, East Antarctica - Interpretations & implications for Atmospheric Variations - Regional to Hemisphere Scales

Mineral dust that originates in remote sources in the Southern Hemisphere is preserved in the stratigraphic records in ice cores from central East Antarctica, which have been found to be useful indicators of variations of climate on timescales of glacial-interglacial. There are ice-free areas around the peripheries of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet with the potential to emit dust, but from this point of view they have been explored to a lesser extent. In this paper the authors¹ present a new profile of the deposition of dust flux and grain size distributions that were obtained at Talos Dome (TALDICE) in Northern Victoria Land, East Antarctica, that receives a significant input of dust from proximal areas that are ice free. Analysis of dust and variations of stable isotopes of water were carried out on samples from the time of the Last Glacial Maximum to the Late Holocene, and these results were then compared to the EPICA Dome C profiles from central East Antarctica. At Talos Dome the smaller glacial-interglacial variations compared to those at Dome C, and during the Holocene a distinctive decreasing trend characterise the TALDICE dust profile. It has been shown by deciphering the composite dust signal from remote and local sources the potential to provide information on regional and larger spatial scales of this combined proxy of source activity and atmospheric transport. The authors¹ show, in particular, how a regional signal related to the history of deglaciation in the Ross Sea Embayment can be superimposed to the glacial-interglacial variability on a broader scale characteristic of other sites in Antarctica.

Sources & Further reading

1. Varma, V., Prange, M., Merkel, U., Kleinen, T., Lohmann, G., Pfeiffer, M., Renssen, H., Wagner, A., Wagner, S., and Schulz, M.: Holocene evolution of the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds in transient simulations with global climate models, Clim. Past, 8, 391-402, doi:10.5194/cp-8-391-2012, 2012