Large shift of the Pacific Walker Circulation across the Cenozoic.

Fluctuations in the Pacific Walker Circulation (PWC), a zonally oriented overturning cell across the tropical Pacific, can cause widespread climatic and biogeochemical perturbations. It remains unknown how the PWC developed during the Cenozoic era, with its substantial changes in greenhouse gases and continental positions. Through a suite of coupled model simulations on tectonic timescales, we demonstrate that the PWC was ∼38° broader and ∼5% more intense during the Early Eocene relative to present. As the climate cooled from the Early Eocene to the Late Miocene, the width of the PWC shrank, accompanied by an increase in intensity that was tied to the enhanced Pacific zonal temperature gradient. However, the locations of the western and eastern branches behave differently from the Early Eocene to the Late Miocene, with the western edge remaining steady with time due to the relatively stable geography of the western tropical Pacific; the eastern edge migrates westward with time as the South American continent moves northwest. A transition occurs in the PWC between the Late Miocene and Late Pliocene, manifested by an eastward shift (both the western and eastern edges migrate eastward by >12°) and weakening (by ∼22%), which we show here is linked with the closure of the tropical seaways. Moreover, our results suggest that rising CO2 favors a weaker PWC under the same land-sea configurations, a robust feature across the large spread of Cenozoic climates considered here, supporting a weakening of the PWC in a warmer future.

Pastoralism may have delayed the end of the green Sahara.

The climate deterioration after the most recent African humid period (AHP) is a notable past example of desertification. Evidence points to a human population expansion in northern Africa prior to this, associated with the introduction of pastoralism. Here we consider the role, if any, of this population on the subsequent ecological collapse. Using a climate-vegetation model, we estimate the natural length of the most recent AHP. The model indicates that the system was most susceptible to collapse between 7 and 6 ka; at least 500 years before the observed collapse. This suggests that the inclusion of increasing elements of pastoralism was an effective adaptation to the regional environmental changes. Pastoralism also appears to have slowed the deterioration caused by orbitally-driven climate change. This supports the view that modern pastoralism is not only sustainable, but beneficial for the management of the world's dryland environments.

Anomalously weak Labrador Sea convection and Atlantic overturning during the past 150 years.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a system of ocean currents that has an essential role in Earth's climate, redistributing heat and influencing the carbon cycle1, 2. The AMOC has been shown to be weakening in recent years 1 ; this decline may reflect decadal-scale variability in convection in the Labrador Sea, but short observational datasets preclude a longer-term perspective on the modern state and variability of Labrador Sea convection and the AMOC1, 3-5. Here we provide several lines of palaeo-oceanographic evidence that Labrador Sea deep convection and the AMOC have been anomalously weak over the past 150 years or so (since the end of the Little Ice Age, LIA, approximately AD 1850) compared with the preceding 1,500 years. Our palaeoclimate reconstructions indicate that the transition occurred either as a predominantly abrupt shift towards the end of the LIA, or as a more gradual, continued decline over the past 150 years; this ambiguity probably arises from non-AMOC influences on the various proxies or from the different sensitivities of these proxies to individual components of the AMOC. We suggest that enhanced freshwater fluxes from the Arctic and Nordic seas towards the end of the LIA-sourced from melting glaciers and thickened sea ice that developed earlier in the LIA-weakened Labrador Sea convection and the AMOC. The lack of a subsequent recovery may have resulted from hysteresis or from twentieth-century melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet 6 . Our results suggest that recent decadal variability in Labrador Sea convection and the AMOC has occurred during an atypical, weak background state. Future work should aim to constrain the roles of internal climate variability and early anthropogenic forcing in the AMOC weakening described here.

Greatly expanded tropical warm pool and weakened Hadley circulation in the early Pliocene.

The Pliocene warm interval has been difficult to explain. We reconstructed the latitudinal distribution of sea surface temperature around 4 million years ago, during the early Pliocene. Our reconstruction shows that the meridional temperature gradient between the equator and subtropics was greatly reduced, implying a vast poleward expansion of the ocean tropical warm pool. Corroborating evidence indicates that the Pacific temperature contrast between the equator and 32 degrees N has evolved from approximately 2 degrees C 4 million years ago to approximately 8 degrees C today. The meridional warm pool expansion evidently had enormous impacts on the Pliocene climate, including a slowdown of the atmospheric Hadley circulation and El Niño-like conditions in the equatorial region. Ultimately, sustaining a climate state with weak tropical sea surface temperature gradients may require additional mechanisms of ocean heat uptake (such as enhanced ocean vertical mixing).