Records of Environmental Changes in the Australian Sector of Pep II Point to Broad Trends of Climate Change

PAGES NEWS, VOL.9, N°2, JULY 2001 For more than 2 decades, much effort has been geared toward understanding conditions that existed in the Australian region at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) around 20,000 years ago. More recently, researchers have increasingly focused on identifying patterns and amplitude of climatic change since the LGM. The excess of evaporation over precipitation, characteristic of a vast portion of Australia, renders it difficult to find lacustrine deposits suitable for the recovery of archives of environmental change. The search of such archives has thus forced researchers to investigate sites offshore in order to determine patterns and amplitudes of environmental change on the Australian continent. A core from one such site, located offshore of the north western tip of Western Australia, some 60 km from Cape Range provides a multiproxy 30, 000 year record. Results are presented in Figure 1. The δ18O record of planktonic foraminifers not only indicates a progressive sealevel rise since the LGM, but also significant fluctuations during the Holocene. These later variations result from an influx of low–salinity Pacific water via the Indonesian throughflow. This variability was intensified as a result of monsoonal activity, which commenced in the region around 14 ky ago as indicated by a decrease in the carbonate content in the core associated with the influx of terrestrial clays brought to the coring site by fluvial waters. The onset of monsoon activity is confirmed by an increase in aquatic pollen content. Mean seasurface temperature reconstructed from foraminifer faunal analyses is surprisingly high at 11 ky, and shows a definite downward trend for the last 5 k years. This record also shows a peak in fluvial discharge indicated by decreased carbon content and aquatic pollen changes between 8 and 7 ky. Conditions in the water column above the site are also indicated by the ratio of nannoplankton taxa G. flabellata and A. robusta (which live in the middle to the lower part of the euphotic zone) to F. profunda [which occur in high concentration in the euphotic zone]. The presence of pteridophyte spores in the upper Records of Environmental Changes in the Australian Sector of Pep II Point to Broad Trends of Climate Change