Abstract
This research was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Antarctic Funding Initiative (grant NE/H014896/1) and NERC Radiocarbon Facility allocation 1605.0312.
Highlights
The Antarctic continent and surrounding ocean have experienced significant climatic changes over the past 60 yr (Turner et al, 2005). These are especially pronounced in the Antarctic Peninsula (AP) region, with an increase in air temperature (Nicolas and Bromwich, 2014) and decreases in sea ice cover around the western AP linked to strengthening westerly air circulation and a stronger Southern Annular Mode (SAM) (Matear et al, 2015)
An ice core record shows that the recent rapid warming is unusual, but not unprecedented, over the past 2000 yr for the northeastern AP (Mulvaney et al, 2012), and a downturn in recorded AP temperature over the past two decades suggests that natural temperature variability in this region is high (Turner et al, 2016)
Critical questions remain over (1) whether temperature variability on the AP is spatially coherent over multi-centennial to millennial time scales; and (2) whether the relationships between past surface air temperature (SAT) and ocean records can satisfactorily explain the underlying causes of regional climate variability
Summary
The Antarctic continent and surrounding ocean have experienced significant climatic changes over the past 60 yr (Turner et al, 2005) These are especially pronounced in the Antarctic Peninsula (AP) region, with an increase in air temperature (Nicolas and Bromwich, 2014) and decreases in sea ice cover around the western AP linked to strengthening westerly air circulation and a stronger Southern Annular Mode (SAM) (Matear et al, 2015). Critical questions remain over (1) whether temperature variability on the AP is spatially coherent over multi-centennial to millennial time scales; and (2) whether the relationships between past surface air temperature (SAT) and ocean records can satisfactorily explain the underlying causes of regional climate variability. We contend that the observed shifts in late Holocene climate on the AP are largely explicable by changes in westerly atmospheric circulation and the SAM, and that long-term shifts in ENSO state were less important in driving AP surface air temperature
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