Widespread six degrees Celsius cooling on land during the Last Glacial Maximum
Top Cited Papers
- 12 May 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature
- Vol. 593 (7858), 228-232
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03467-6
Abstract
The magnitude of global cooling during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, the coldest multimillennial interval of the last glacial period) is an important constraint for evaluating estimates of Earth’s climate sensitivity1,2. Reliable LGM temperatures come from high-latitude ice cores3,4, but substantial disagreement exists between proxy records in the low latitudes1,5,6,7,8, where quantitative low-elevation records on land are scarce. Filling this data gap, noble gases in ancient groundwater record past land surface temperatures through a direct physical relationship that is rooted in their temperature-dependent solubility in water9,10. Dissolved noble gases are suitable tracers of LGM temperature because of their complete insensitivity to biological and chemical processes and the ubiquity of LGM-aged groundwater around the globe11,12. However, although several individual noble gas studies have found substantial tropical LGM cooling13,<a data-track="click" data-track-action="reference anchor"...This publication has 77 references indexed in Scilit:
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