Sea Level Record: Applications to Global Climate

该奖项支持对巴巴多斯珊瑚礁进行近海取心，以获取过去20,000年的详细海平面记录。对礁顶珊瑚的U系列测年表明，在最后一次冰川高峰期，海平面大约比现在的海平面低120米。海平面上升并不是单调的；相反，在冰川消融期间，海平面上升的速度至少有三次出现了一系列的跃升，每年超过2厘米。与海平面上升相关的冰川融水清楚地记录在浮游有孔虫的氧同位素记录中。就在这次海平面跃升之前，北大西洋深水生产和相关的经向热量输送开始。在同一珊瑚样本上测量C-14和U-系列年龄，也将提供一个独特的机会，以校准超过10,000年树状年代学的C-14时间尺度。超过10000年的放射性碳校准对于气候研究至关重要，气候研究将放射性碳年代测定的代用数据与基于年层计数的绝对年表进行比较，例如冰芯记录或天文计算。这些结果对气候和地球物理模型有直接影响，这些模型包含了基于校准的放射性碳记录的气候滞后或气候变化速率。

This award supports offshore coring into the coral reefs of Barbados to retrieve a detailed sea level record for the past 20,000 years. U-series dating of the reef crest coral indicates that sea level was approximately 120 meters below present sea level during the last glacial maximum. Sea level rise was not monotonic; rather, it was marked by a series of jumps with rates of sea level rise exceeding 2cm per year at least three times during the deglaciation. The glacial meltwater associated with this sea level rise is clearly recorded in the oxygen isotopic records of planktonic foraminifera. Immediately preceding this sea level jump was the initiation of North Atlantic Deep Water production and associated meridional heat transport. Measurement of C-14 and U-Series ages on the same coral samples, will also provide a unique opportunity to calibrate the C- 14 time scale beyond the 10,000 year dendrochronology. The radiocarbon calibration beyond 10,000 years is critical for climate research that compares radiocarbon-dated proxies with absolute chronologies based on annual layer counting, such as ice core records or astronomical calculation. These results have immediate implications for climate and geophysical models that incorporate phase lags or rates of climate change based on calibrated radiocarbon records.