Deep-sea coral evidence for lower Southern Ocean surface nitrate concentrations during the last ice age

The Southern Ocean regulates the ocean's biological sequestration of CO₂ and is widely suspected to underpin much of the ice age decline in atmospheric CO₂ concentration, but the specific changes in the region are debated. Although more complete drawdown of surface nutrients by phytoplankton during the ice ages is supported by some sediment core-based measurements, the use of different proxies in different regions has precluded a unified view of Southern Ocean biogeochemical change. Here, we report measurements of the ¹⁵N/¹⁴N of fossil-bound organic matter in the stony deep-sea coral Desmophyllum dianthus, a tool for reconstructing surface ocean nutrient conditions. The central robust observation is of higher ¹⁵N/¹⁴N across the Southern Ocean during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), 18-25 thousand years ago. These data suggest a reduced summer surface nitrate concentration in both the Antarctic and Subantarctic Zones during the LGM, with little surface nitrate transport between them. After the ice age, the increase in Antarctic surface nitrate occurred through the deglaciation and continued in the Holocene. The rise in Subantarctic surface nitrate appears to have had both early deglacial and late deglacial/Holocene components, preliminarily attributed to the end of Subantarctic iron fertilization and increasing nitrate input from the surface Antarctic Zone, respectively.

Two modes of change in Southern Ocean productivity over the past million years

Export of organic carbon from surface waters of the Antarctic Zone of the Southern Ocean decreased during the last ice age, coinciding with declining atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO(2)) concentrations, signaling reduced exchange of CO(2) between the ocean interior and the atmosphere. In contrast, in the Subantarctic Zone, export production increased into ice ages coinciding with rising dust fluxes, thus suggesting iron fertilization of subantarctic phytoplankton. Here, a new high-resolution productivity record from the Antarctic Zone is compiled with parallel subantarctic data over the past million years. Together, they fit the view that the combination of these two modes of Southern Ocean change determines the temporal structure of the glacial-interglacial atmospheric CO(2) record, including during the interval of "lukewarm" interglacials between 450 and 800 thousand years ago.