RESUMO
Two deep ice cores from central Greenland, drilled in the 1990s, have played a key role in climate reconstructions of the Northern Hemisphere, but the oldest sections of the cores were disturbed in chronology owing to ice folding near the bedrock. Here we present an undisturbed climate record from a North Greenland ice core, which extends back to 123,000 years before the present, within the last interglacial period. The oxygen isotopes in the ice imply that climate was stable during the last interglacial period, with temperatures 5 degrees C warmer than today. We find unexpectedly large temperature differences between our new record from northern Greenland and the undisturbed sections of the cores from central Greenland, suggesting that the extent of ice in the Northern Hemisphere modulated the latitudinal temperature gradients in Greenland. This record shows a slow decline in temperatures that marked the initiation of the last glacial period. Our record reveals a hitherto unrecognized warm period initiated by an abrupt climate warming about 115,000 years ago, before glacial conditions were fully developed. This event does not appear to have an immediate Antarctic counterpart, suggesting that the climate see-saw between the hemispheres (which dominated the last glacial period) was not operating at this time.
RESUMO
High quality records of stratospheric volcanic eruptions, required to model past climate variability, have been constructed by identifying synchronous (bipolar) volcanic sulfate horizons in Greenland and Antarctic ice cores. Here we present a new 2600-year chronology of stratospheric volcanic events using an independent approach that relies on isotopic signatures (Δ33S and in some cases Δ17O) of ice core sulfate from five closely-located ice cores from Dome C, Antarctica. The Dome C stratospheric reconstruction provides independent validation of prior reconstructions. The isotopic approach documents several high-latitude stratospheric events that are not bipolar, but climatically-relevant, and diverges deeper in the record revealing tropospheric signals for some previously assigned bipolar events. Our record also displays a collapse of the Δ17O anomaly of sulfate for the largest volcanic eruptions, showing a further change in atmospheric chemistry induced by large emissions. Thus, the refinement added by considering both isotopic and bipolar correlation methods provides additional levels of insight for climate-volcano connections and improves ice core volcanic reconstructions.
RESUMO
The authors became aware of a mistake in the data and axis labeling in Fig. 2 in the original version of the Article. Specifically, the authors mistakenly copied and pasted a formula for background correction instead of the actual values. As a result of this, Fig. 3 was updated to replace the incorrect label 'sulfate flux (kg km-2)' with the correct 'sulfate concentrations (ng g-1)' on the far-left y-axes in both panels, and to add the correct data for Δ33S, as given by the red dotted lines. The correct version of Fig. 3 is shown below as Fig. 1, which replaced the previous incorrect version, shown below as Fig. 2. This has been corrected in both the PDF and the HTML versions of the Article. The findings and interpretations in the original Article are based on the correct dataset, and this error does not affect the original discussion or conclusions of the Article. The authors apologize for the confusion caused by this mistake.