Carbon isotope budget indicates biological disequilibrium dominated ocean carbon storage at the Last Glacial Maximum

Anne Willem Omta (), Christopher L. Follett, Jonathan M. Lauderdale and Raffaele Ferrari
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Anne Willem Omta: Case Western Reserve University
Christopher L. Follett: University of Liverpool
Jonathan M. Lauderdale: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Raffaele Ferrari: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Understanding the causes of the ~90 ppmv atmospheric CO2 swings between glacial and interglacial climates is an important open challenge in paleoclimate research. Although the regularity of the glacial-interglacial cycles hints at a single driving mechanism, Earth System models require many independent physical and biological processes to explain the full observed CO2 signal. Here we show that biologically sequestered carbon in the ocean can explain an atmospheric CO2 change of 75 ± 40 ppmv, based on a mass balance calculation using published carbon isotopic measurements. An analysis of the carbon isotopic signatures of different water masses indicates similar regenerated carbon inventories at the Last Glacial Maximum and during the Holocene, requiring that the change in carbon storage was dominated by disequilibrium. We attribute the inferred change in carbon disequilibrium to expansion of sea-ice or change in the overturning circulation.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-52360-z

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