Authors: Simon Yang Eric Galbraith Jaime Palter
Publish Date: 2013/05/25
Volume: 43, Issue: 1-2, Pages: 37-52
Abstract
Tectonicallyactive gateways between ocean basins have modified ocean circulation over Earth history Today the Atlantic and Pacific are directly connected via the Drake Passage which forms a barrier to the timemean geostrophic transport between the subtropics and Antarctica In contrast during the warm early Cenozoic era when Antarctica was icefree the Drake Passage was closed Instead at that time the separation of North and South America provided a tropical seaway between the Atlantic and Pacific that remained open until the Isthmus of Panama formed in the relatively recent geological past Ocean circulation models have previously been used to explore the individual impacts of the Drake Passage and the Panama Seaway but rarely have the two gateways been considered together and most explorations have used very simple atmospheric models Here we use a coupled ocean–ice–atmosphere model GFDL’s CM2Mc to simulate the impacts of a closed Drake Passage both with and without a Panama Seaway We find that the climate response to a closed Drake Passage is relatively small when the Panama Seaway is absent similar to prior studies although the coupling to a dynamical atmosphere does increase the temperature change However with a Panama Seaway closing Drake Passage has a much larger effect due to the cessation of deep water formation in the northern hemisphere Both gateways alter the transport of salt by ocean circulation with the Panama Seaway allowing fresh Pacific water to be imported to the North Atlantic and the Drake Passage preventing the flow of saline subtropical water to the circumAntarctic a flow that is particularly strong when the Panama Seaway is open Thus with a Panama Seaway and a closed Drake Passage the Southern Ocean tends to be relatively salty while the North Atlantic tends to be relatively fresh such that the deep ocean is ventilated from the circumAntarctic Ensuing changes in the ocean heat transport drive a bipolar shift of surface ocean temperatures and the Intertropical Convergence Zone migrates toward the warmer southern hemisphere The response of clouds to changes in surface ocean temperatures amplifies the climate response resulting in temperature changes of up to 9 °C over Antarctica even in the absence of landice feedbacks These results emphasize the importance of tectonic gateways to the climate history of the Cenozoic and support a role for ocean circulation changes in the glaciation of AntarcticaThis work was supported by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research CIFAR Earth System Evolution Program and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada NSERC Compute Canada and Scinet provided the computational resources
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