Extreme weather events recorded by daily to hourly resolution biogeochemical proxies of marine giant clam shells.

Paleoclimate research has built a framework for Earth's climate changes over the past 65 million years or even longer. However, our knowledge of weather-timescale extreme events (WEEs, also named paleoweather), which usually occur over several days or hours, under different climate regimes is almost blank because current paleoclimatic records rarely provide information with temporal resolution shorter than monthly scale. Here we show that giant clam shells (Tridacna spp.) from the tropical western Pacific have clear daily growth bands, and several 2-y-long (from January 29, 2012 to December 9, 2013) daily to hourly resolution biological and geochemical records, including daily growth rate, hourly elements/Ca ratios, and fluorescence intensity, were obtained. We found that the pulsed changes of these ultra-high-resolution proxy records clearly matched with the typical instrumental WEEs, for example, tropical cyclones during the summer-autumn and cold surges during the winter. When a tropical cyclone passes through or approaches the sampling site, the growth rate of Tridacna shell decreases abruptly due to the bad weather. Meanwhile, enhanced vertical mixing brings nutrient-enriched subsurface water to the surface, resulting in a high Fe/Ca ratio and strong fluorescence intensity (induced by phytoplankton bloom) in the shell. Our results demonstrate that Tridacna shell has the potential to be used as an ultra-high-resolution archive for paleoweather reconstructions. The fossil shells living in different geological times can be built as a Geological Weather Station network to lengthen the modern instrumental data and investigate the WEEs under various climate conditions.

Dynamic of Tridacna spp. population variability in northern SCS over past 4500 years derived from AMS 14C dating.

The marine bivalve, Tridacna spp. is an iconic invertebrate of the Indo-Pacific coral reef communities from Eocene to present. However, field observations found that the population of Tridacna spp. has declined in recent decades and some species are now endangered in the northern South China Sea (SCS) of western Pacific, which are speculated to be connected with the human overfishing and/or climate changes. Thus distinguishing the impacts of human activities and climate changes on Tridacna spp. populations is essential for understanding the dynamic of Tridacna spp. population variability. Such effort will be important in launching conservation policies and restoring population. Here, extensive sampling was applied on sub-fossil Tridacna spp. shells at the North Reef of the northern SCS, and the long-lived (with a lifespan more than 30 years) Tridacna spp. population index (LTPI) over the past 4500 years was obtained based on the AMS14C dating method. The results show that LTPI has experienced several short-term collapses (shorter than 200 years) over the past 4500 years, which may be associated with excessive cold winter temperatures. Remarkably, LTPI usually recovered rapidly after the rewarming of temperatures, indicating a robust self-recruitment mechanisms in response to natural climate changes. However, the last catastrophic collapse of LTPI that occurred at around ~1820 CE - ~1900 CE didn't rebound despite the significant rise in temperature over the recent 100 years. The decoupling between LTPI and climate changes in recent hundred years was probably induced by the increased commercial fishing in the SCS, which has overwhelmed and exacerbated the self-recruitment mechanisms between Tridacna spp. population and climate changes.