New Arabian Sea records help decipher orbital timing of Indo-Asian monsoon

Abstract

A recent study suggested that Indian monsoonal proxies commonly used in the Arabian Sea, in general productivity proxies, could be impacted by changes in the Atlantic overturning rate (AMOC) throughout a control on the nutrient delivery into the euphotic zone. This oceanic mechanism could lead to a misunderstanding between the Indian summer monsoon (SM) and orbital forcing and could confuse a direct comparison with other archives derived from other monsoonal sub-systems (such as East-Asian or African records). Here we analyze three independent proxies (bromine, foraminifera assemblages and grain size) extracted from a marine sediment core (MD04-2861) covering the last 310 ka, and retrieved in the northern Arabian Sea near the Makran margin, an area influenced by summer and winter Indian monsoon. The grain size proxy deals with the regional continental climate through fluvial and eolian processes. It cannot be linked to changes in nutrient content of AMOC and present the same phase relationship (timing) than the other SM proxies. This demonstrates that the productivity signals (Bromine) in the northern Arabian Sea are mainly controlled by SM dynamics and not AMOC modulated nutrients at orbital scale changes. We thus build a multi-proxy record of SM variability (i.e. SM stack) using statistical tools (principal component analysis) further compiled on an age model constructed independently from orbital tuning. We find that strong SM lag by 9 ± 1 ka the NH summer insolation maximum (minimum of precession, June 21 perihelion and obliquity maximum) in the precession band, and by 6 ± 1.3 ka in the Obliquity band. These results are consistent with previous studies based on marine and terrestrial records in both Indian and Asian regions, except Asian speleothems. Our study supports the hypothesis that internal climate forcing (decreased ice volume together with the increase of latent heat export from the southern Indian Ocean) set the timing of strong Indo-Asian summer monsoons within both the precession and obliquity cycle. The external forcing (direct sensible heating) initiate monsoonal circulation. Strong Indian winter monsoon (WM) occurs between ice maxima and northern hemisphere sensible heat minima, indicating that both act to strengthen WM circulation. The summer and winter monsoons are in antiphase in the precession band suggesting that the two systems are dynamically linked.