Sea-surface temperature reconstruction of the western South Atlantic: new planktonic foraminiferal correlation function

NATALIA GARCIA CHAPORI; CRISTIANO MAZUR CHIESSI; TORSTEN BIEKERT; CECILIA LAPRIDA

PALAEOGEOGRAPHY PALAEOCLIMATOLOGY PALAEOECOLOGY

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2015 p. 67 - 75

0031-0182

The study of environmental changes throughout the geologic time requires consideration of biotic (e.g. species, populations, communities, biotic interactions), as well as of abiotic components (e.g. climate, water chemistry, water temperature and depth). When the abiotic components of past ecosystems can be reconstructed based on the analysis of fossil biotic components, the later can be regarded as variables of a set of predictive functions within the past ecological system under investigation (Birks et al., 2010). In this sense, the development of quantitative techniques for inferring past environmental variables from multiproxy studies enables the direct analysis of the biotic response in the face of environmental changes over a range of time scales in the past (Birks and Birks, 2006). In paleoceanography, the first studies that reconstructed abiotic components based on the analysis of the biotic components of the fossil record were the ones that related planktonic foraminifera with sea surface temperature (SST; e.g. Ericson, 1959; Boltovskoy, 1966; Bé, 1977) through the Indicator-Species Approach (Birks et al., 2010). This method emphasized on the dominance, relative abundance and changes in the morphology of certain species (Murray, 1897; Ericson, 1959; Boltovskoy et al., 1996; Kohfeld et al., 1996). Such is the case of Neogloboquadrina extracted from the western South Atlantic. The downcore reconstruction shows negative anomalies in sea-surface temperatures during the early-mid Holocene and temperatures within the range of modern values during the late Holocene. This pattern is consistent with available reconstructions.