A carbon cycle coupled climate model of Neoproterozoic glaciation: Explicit carbon cycle with stochastic perturbations

Abstract

[1] It has been suggested that a negative climate feedback may have operated during the Neoproterozoic Era as a consequence of the existence of a massive oceanic pool of dissolved organic carbon (DOC). As climate cooled so as to induce intense glaciation, the drawdown of oxygen into the Neoproterozoic ocean would have been enhanced because of the temperature dependence of the solubility of oxygen in seawater. Such increasing ventilation would have enhanced DOC remineralization, thus increasing the content of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) in the ocean. CO2 concentration in the atmosphere increases rapidly with DIC, thereby inhibiting further climate cooling. The model employed to illustrate the resulting climate dynamical behavior was an idealized one in which stochastic influence was assumed to be absent. However, such influence is expected to exist due to the action of processes that are not explicitly included in the model. Furthermore, the paleogeography assumed for the purpose of the published analyses was more appropriate to the Marinoan glaciation than to the earlier Sturtian event. In this paper, we fully investigate the stability of the system represented by the carbon cycle coupled climate model for both the Marinoan and Sturtian continental configurations and in the presence of stochastic perturbations. It is found that the hysteresis predicted by the ice sheet coupled model is sensitive to both continental configuration and to the strength of the negative feedback which arises due to carbon cycle coupling. Nevertheless, the very low frequency cyclic glaciation process predicted by the initial version of the model is found to persist in the presence of noise of significant amplitude. However, this cyclic behavior may be arrested entirely if the glaciation process were to result in insufficient alkalinity being delivered to the ocean basins. In this case the system would be expected to execute only a single excursion into and escape from the glacial state.