Climate history written in dust

EurekAlert via the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research: In spring 2010, the research icebreaker Polarstern returned from the South Pacific with a scientific treasure - ocean sediments from a previously almost unexplored part of the South Polar Sea. What looks like an inconspicuous sample of mud to a layman is, to geological history researchers, a valuable archive from which they can reconstruct the climatic history of the polar areas over many years of analysis. This, in turn, is of fundamental importance for understanding global climatic development. With the help of the unique sediment cores from the Southern Ocean, it is now possible to provide complete evidence of how dust has had a major influence on the natural exchange between cold and warm periods in the southern hemisphere. An international research team under the management of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven was able to prove that dust infiltrations there were 2 to 3 times higher during all the ice ages in the last million years than in the warm phases in climatic history.

"High large-area dust supply can have an effect on the climate for two major reasons", explained Dr. Frank Lamy, geoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, about the findings. "Trace substances such as iron, which are essential for life, can be incorporated into the ocean through dust. This stimulates biological production and increases the sea's capacity to bind carbon. The result is that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is taken out of the atmosphere. In the atmosphere itself, dust reflects the sun's radiation and purely due to this it reduces the heat input into the Earth's system. Both effects lead to the fact that the Earth cools down."
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...The influence of dust supply on the climate changes between ice ages and warm periods has long been suspected. Climatic researchers always found particularly high dust content containing iron when the earth was going through an ice age, both in Antarctic ice cores and in sediment cores from the Atlantic part of the Southern Ocean. However, up to now there was no data available for the Pacific section, which covers 50% of the Southern Ocean. "We can now close this central gap" is how Lamy underlines the importance of the new study. "The result is that we are now finding the same patterns in the South Pacific that we found in cores from the South Atlantic and the Antarctic ice. Therefore, the increased dust input was a phenomenon affecting the southern hemisphere during colder periods. This means that they now have to be considered differently when assessing the complex mechanisms which control natural climate changes."

..."Our investigations have now proved without a doubt that colder periods in the southern hemisphere over a period of 1 million years always and almost everywhere coincided, , with lower carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere and higher dust supply from the air. The climatic history of the Earth was, therefore, written in dust." ...

NASA image of dust over southeast Australia