Millennium scale environment changes of the Okhotsk Sea during last 80 kyr and their phase relationship with global climate changes

Abstract

The paper presents the records of several paleoproductivity proxies (PP) (biogenic opal and Ba (Si_bio, Ba_bio), organic carbon (C_org) and carbonate Ca_carb, chlorin and benthic foraminifera abundance (BFA)) in sediments of the Okhotsk Sea for the last 80 kyr with a resolution of ∼100–300 years. The sediment age model was based on the AMS 14C data, records of benthic foraminifera δ18O, paleointensity of the Earth’s geomagnetic field and magnetic susceptibility. PP values demonstrate series of severe prolonged productivity drops in the Okhotsk Sea followed by a sharp increase during the last glaciation. On the basis of quantitative estimations of the paleoproductivity in the Okhotsk Sea during the cold MIS 2 and warm Holocene (Gorbarenko and Goldberg, 2005), it is suggested that the millennium scale relationship in productivity-climate changes of this basin was similar: an increase in the sea’s productivity was related with regional climate warming and vice-versa. The PP records of productivity/climate oscillations in the Okhotsk Sea during MIS 2–4 occurred contemporaneously with the North Atlantic cold Heinrich events (HE) and Greenland Dansgaard-Oyeshger interstadial (DOI). Observed successions of prolonged climate cooling events followed by rapid, abrupt warming are similar to climate and environmental oscillations in the N. Atlantic and Greenland, that confirms the millennium-scale climate changes synchronicities in the Northern Hemisphere including the far NW Pacific, the hydrology and climate conditions of which are close to those of the Okhotsk Sea. Synchronism of the N. Hemisphere severe cooling (including the Okhotsk Sea) with the Antarctic warming suggests that mechanisms of the “seesaw” effect (Blunier and Brook, 2001) in the low latitude heat redistribution between high latitudes of both hemispheres were more complicated than direct NADW formation forcing and encompasses the global atmospheric reorganization. Within the PP used a closer connection in the Okhotsk Sea millennium oscillations was observed for the C_org, BFA and chlorin; Ba_bio increases more closely to DOI. Si_bio variability does not show any evident correlation with productivity changes.