New study gives clues about carbon dioxide patterns at end of Ice Age

LONDON - A new study has put to rest the mystery of where old carbon was stored during the last glacial period.

It turns out it ended up in the icy waters of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica.

The findings by University of Florida have implications for modern-day global warming, said Ellen Martin, a UF geological sciences professor and an author of the paper.

Scientists know that during the transition from the last glacial period to the current inter-glacial period about 14,000 years ago, carbon dioxide levels rose very quickly at the same time that the age of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fell, as measured by radiocarbon data. That suggests carbon dioxide had been stored in the ocean and suddenly released, she said.

One idea holds that it was building up in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, where extensive sea ice on the surface of the ocean initially prevented the exchange of gasses into the atmosphere, Martin said. The other possibility is that the same process occurred in the Northern Hemisphere with ice sheets in the North Pacific Ocean, she said.

In her lab, Martin and lead author Chandranath Basak, a UF graduate student in geological sciences; Keiji Horikawa, a UF postdoctoral fellow in geological sciences; and Thomas Marchitto, a University of Colorado geology professor, studied that question y using a technique to measure isotopes of neodymium, a rare earth element not commonly found in marine sediments but preserved in microscopic fossil fish teeth. The isotopic signature of a water mass, which is captured in the fish teeth, reflects the location where the water mass came from, she said.

The researchers took samples that had been shown to have old carbon in them and measured the neodymium isotopes on fish teeth from the sediments to see if they could reconstruct whether they had come from the North Pacific or the Southern Ocean, she said.
“When we did this, we got a signal that looks very much like the Southern Ocean,” Martin said.

“It implies that all the carbon was being stored in the Southern Hemisphere and as the ice sheet melted back, it released that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing part of the big increase in carbon dioxide and introducing old carbon back into the atmosphere,” she added.

By giving information about environmental conditions during the last glacial period, the research findings can help scientists to reconstruct what the world was like at that time, she said.

The research has been published in journal Nature Geoscience. (ANI)