Majorcan Caves, Sea-Level Changes, And Astronomical Forcing

Details Majorcan Caves, Sea-Level Changes, And Astronomical Forcing Majorcan Caves, Sea-Level Changes, And Astronomical Forcing

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006agufmpp51d1165o&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2006, abstract #PP51D-1165

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

4556 Sea Level: Variations And Mean (1222, 1225, 1641), 4934 Insolation Forcing, 4958 Speleothems

Scientific paper

Secondary carbonate deposits in caves, known as speleothems, preserve a variety of palaeoenvironmental signals. The coastal caves of Mallorca display an unusual type of carbonate encrustation that enables a test of the Milankovitch theory of Earth's orbital forcing on global ice-volume fluctuations ~80 thousands years (kyr) ago. Here we reconstruct western Mediterranean Sea level between ~82 and ~80 kyr ago based on precise U/Th TIMS ages on carbonate encrustations. We find the sea level on Mallorca stood ~1.5 m above the present during marine isotope substage (MIS) 5a. We observe a general agreement between the timing of MIS 5a sea-level highstand and data from ice-cores and deep-sea oxygen isotope stratigraphy. Although our data constrain the age of the MIS 5a sea-level maximum, its absolute altitude is unexpected because it may imply that MIS 5a was about as ice-free as the late Holocene. We also find that sea-level rose after MIS 5b up to 22 m (~0.64 cm yr-1), in phase with the insolation increase, to reach the MIS 5a level, and it fell rapidly 15 m (~0.97 cm yr-1) at the onset of MIS 4. We suggest these correlations indicate that changes in insolation, caused by astronomical forcing, triggered sea-level shifts of significant magnitudes over short timescales.

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