Environmental and climate variability in Antarctica during the Last Interglacial

Abstract

In the context of paleoclimatology, the Antarctic ice core is a powerful archive of the past Earth climate because inside them are stored paleoclimatic proxy, useful tracers of the global hydrological cycle (Dansgaard, 1964). The last interglacial period, also known as Eemian (132–116 ka BP), characterized by global temperatures and sea level higher than today, has been found in six East Antarctic ice cores. A previous study (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2011) has shown that the δ18O records obtained from these ice cores depict a quite homogeneous pattern during the present and last interglacials. Unusually important regional differences appear in the TALos Dome ICE core, these may be related to both elevation changes and sea-ice variability. Talos Dome is a peripheral dome of East Antarctica, located in the Ross Sea sector where a deep ice core has been retrieved. To reconstruct the past climate it was widely utilized the stable isotopic composition δ18O and δD of water molecules recorded in the ice cores samples, while the deuterium excess (d=δD – 8*δ18O) contains information about climate conditions of source regions of Antarctic precipitation. In this thesis work we present a new deuterium excess record obtained from the TALDICE ice core analysing the high resolution samples obtained from the 5 cm cuttings between 1384 and 1414 m, corresponding to the 115-131 ka BP period. This new isotopic record will be compared to other isotopic records from EPICA Dome C ice core as well as to high resolution sea-salt sodium(ssNa, a marine aerosol indicator) and non-sea-salt calcium (nssCa, a terrestrial aerosol indicator) records obtained from the TALDICE ice core in order to understand the regional differences highlighted by this site.