Abstract
Over the past ten years, sedimentary geochemists have noted that climate changes associated with Pleistocene glaciations have had a pronounced effect on the rate of organic carbon burial found in the tropical oceans1–4. In particular, two to five times higher organic carbon accumulation rates have been observed for the 18 kyr BP glacial maximum than for the Holocene in several short sediment cores from both oceans (see Fig. 1). Here I present 300-kyr time series for organic carbon mass accumulation rate from four sediment cores, two each from the equatorial Pacific and Atlantic, and show that orbital forcing of global climate has strongly affected the rate of organic carbon burial in the equatorial oceans.
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Lyle, M. Climatically forced organic carbon burial in equatorial Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Nature 335, 529–532 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1038/335529a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/335529a0
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