Low CO₂ levels of the entire Pleistocene epoch
Abstract
Quantifying ancient atmospheric pCO₂ provides valuable insights into the interplay between greenhouse gases and global climate. Beyond the 800-ky history uncovered by ice cores, discrepancies in both the trend and magnitude of pCO₂ changes remain among different proxy-derived results. The traditional paleosol pCO₂ paleobarometer suffers from largely unconstrained soil-respired CO₂ concentration (S(z)). Using finely disseminated carbonates precipitated in paleosols from the Chinese Loess Plateau, here we identified that their S(z) can be quantitatively constrained by soil magnetic susceptibility. Based on this approach, we reconstructed pCO₂ during 2.6–0.9 Ma, which documents overall low pCO₂ levels (<300 ppm) comparable with ice core records, indicating that the Earth system has operated under late Pleistocene pCO₂ levels for an extended period. The pCO₂ levels do not show statistically significant differences across the mid-Pleistocene Transition (ca. 1.2–0.8 Ma), suggesting that CO₂ is probably not the driver of this important climate change event.
Additional Information
© 2019 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 08 January 2019; Accepted 05 September 2019; Published 25 September 2019. This work was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (41773118 and 41230526 to J.J.) and the program A for Outstanding Ph.D. candidate of Nanjing University (to J.D.). Author Contributions: J.J. and J.D. conceived this research. J.D. and X.M. performed laboratory analyses. J.D. and G.L. performed statistical analysis of the data. J.D., Y.G.Z., and G.L. wrote the manuscript with input from all authors. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the data, led by J.J. and Y.G.Z. Data availability: All stable carbon isotope and magnetic susceptibility data from the Luochuan section of the Chinese Loess Plateau, as well as the calculated S(z) and pCO_2 are attached as a Supplementary Data file. The authors have no competing interests to declare.Attached Files
Published - s41467-019-12357-5.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2019_12357_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2019_12357_MOESM2_ESM.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2019_12357_MOESM3_ESM.xlsx
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Additional details
- Alternative title
- Low CO2 levels of the entire Pleistocene epoch
- PMCID
- PMC6761161
- Eprint ID
- 98915
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190930-083721038
- 41773118
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- 41230526
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Nanjing University
- Created
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2019-09-30Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-02-23Created from EPrint's last_modified field