Late Quaternary rapid climate change in northern Chile

Abstract

Analyses of terrigenous sediments from the Chilean continental slope off the southern border of the Atacama desert (27.5°S), focusing on illite crystallinity and the Fe:Al ratio of the sediments, reveal a high‐frequency variability of the position of the Southern Westerlies, which is very similar to the coeval short‐term climatic events known from Greenland ice cores and from North Atlantic sediments. Besides showing dominantly precession‐driven variability in precipitation over the Andes, these analyses also reveal rapid changes in weathering intensity along the Chilean Coastal Range during the last 80,000 years. These rapid changes occur at much shorter timescales than the 19–100 kyr orbital forcing of the Milankovitch cycles.