Premium
Late Quaternary rapid climate change in northern Chile
Author(s) -
Frank Lamy,
Jens Klump,
Dierk Hebbeln,
Wefer
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
terra nova
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.353
H-Index - 89
eISSN - 1365-3121
pISSN - 0954-4879
DOI - 10.1046/j.1365-3121.2000.00265.x
Subject(s) - geology , terrigenous sediment , orbital forcing , quaternary , milankovitch cycles , paleoclimatology , westerlies , climate change , oceanography , climatology , physical geography , paleontology , glacial period , sediment , geography
Analyses of terrigenous sediments from the Chilean continental slope off the southern border of the Atacama desert (27.5°S), focusing on illite crystallinity and the Fe:Al ratio of the sediments, reveal a high‐frequency variability of the position of the Southern Westerlies, which is very similar to the coeval short‐term climatic events known from Greenland ice cores and from North Atlantic sediments. Besides showing dominantly precession‐driven variability in precipitation over the Andes, these analyses also reveal rapid changes in weathering intensity along the Chilean Coastal Range during the last 80,000 years. These rapid changes occur at much shorter timescales than the 19–100 kyr orbital forcing of the Milankovitch cycles.