Coherent variations of the obliquity components in global ice volume and ocean carbon reservoir over the past 5 Ma

Abstract

The Milankovic theory stresses that the summer insolation in the high northern latitudes that is dominated by the precession cycle controls the glacial/interglacial cycles in global climate change. If the climate system responds linearly to the external insolation forcing, the precession cycle of 23 or 19 ka should dominate the variations in the climatic proxy records. I performed spectral and evolutive cross spectral analyses on the high resolution benthic δ 18O and δ 13C records from the South China Sea and the North Atlantic, the proxies of global ice volume and ocean carbon reservoir respectively. I found that the obliquity instead of the eccentricity or the precession is the most marked cycle in the global ice volume and ocean carbon reservoir variations over the past 5 Ma. The analysis further reveals that only at the obliquity band instead of the eccentricity or the precession band does the global ice volume and ocean carbon reservoir display consistently high coherency and stable phase relationship over the past 5 Ma. The consistently positive or near-zero phases of the benthic −δ 18O relative to the benthic δ 13C at the obliquity band suggest that the global carbon cycle is involved in the polar ice sheet growth as an important internal feedback, not a determinative driving factor. The obliquity instead of the precession or the eccentricity takes the dominant role of driving the global climate change during the Pliocene and Pleistocene.