Onset of climate change at last glacial-holocene transition: role of the tropical Pacific

Abstract

We study palaeoclimatic records from various sites spread around the earth, focusing on the start of the last glacial-interglacial transition. The warming, as recorded in the δ¹⁸O record started first in the tropics, then propagated to the Antarctic and then finally to the Arctic. Our analysis of the data suggests that it took about 7.6 ka for onset of climate change to propagate globally. We propose that the tropical Pacific played a major role in initiating the warming in the tropics. We discuss mechanisms that could have transported this heat from the tropics to Antarctica and then to the Arctic during transition to the interglacial.