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Published December 7, 1995 | public
Journal Article

A 100-kyr periodicity in the flux of extraterrestrial ^3He to the sea floor

Abstract

Most of the helium-3 in oceanic sediments comes from interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), and can therefore be used to infer the accretion rate of dust to the Earth through time. ^3He records from slowly accumulating pelagic clays indicate that the accretion rate varies considerably over millions of years, probably owing to cometary and asteroidal break-up events. Muller and MacDonald have proposed that periodic changes in this accretion rate due to a previously unrecognized 100-kyr periodicity in the Earth's orbital inclination might account for the prominence of this frequency in climate records of the past million years. Here we report variations in the 3^He flux to the sea floor that support this idea. We find that the flux recorded in rapidly accumulating Quaternary sediments from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge oscillates with a period of about 100 kyr. We cannot yet say, however, whether the 100-kyr climate cycle is a consequence of, a cause of, or an effect independent of these periodic changes

Additional Information

© 1995 Nature Publishing Group Received 19 June; accepted 30 October 1995; 07 December 1995 This work was supported by the NSF. We thank W. Alvarez for early discussions which led to th1s work, R. Muller, F. Marcantonio, A. Anbar and S. Love for helpful discussions. R. Wolf for analytical assistance, and S. Dermott, R. Poreda and W. Ruddiman for careful rev1ews.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023