Greatly Expanded Tropical Warm Pool and Weakened Hadley Circulation in the Early Pliocene
Abstract
The Pliocene warm interval has been difficult to explain. We reconstructed the latitudinal distribution of sea surface temperature around 4 million years ago, during the early Pliocene. Our reconstruction shows that the meridional temperature gradient between the equator and subtropics was greatly reduced, implying a vast poleward expansion of the ocean tropical warm pool. Corroborating evidence indicates that the Pacific temperature contrast between the equator and 32°N has evolved from ∼2°C 4 million years ago to ∼8°C today. The meridional warm pool expansion evidently had enormous impacts on the Pliocene climate, including a slowdown of the atmospheric Hadley circulation and El Niño–like conditions in the equatorial region. Ultimately, sustaining a climate state with weak tropical sea surface temperature gradients may require additional mechanisms of ocean heat uptake (such as enhanced ocean vertical mixing).
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A.V.F. thanks G. Philander, M. Barreiro, R. Pacanowski, Y. Rosenthal, C. Ravelo, P. deMenocal, P. Dekens, A. Haywood, and C. Wunsch for numerous discussions of this topic. Supported by NSF grant OCE-0550439, U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science grants DE-FG02-06ER64238 and DE-FG02-08ER64590, and a David and Lucile Packard Foundation fellowship (A.V.F.), NSF grant OCE-0623487 (T.D.H.), and a Flint Fellowship at Yale University (Z.L.).
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Science
Volume 323 | Issue 5922
27 March 2009
27 March 2009
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American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Received: 24 October 2008
Accepted: 9 February 2009
Published in print: 27 March 2009
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