Tropical sea-surface temperatures during the last glacial period: A view based on alkenones in Indian Ocean sediments

The quantification of tropical temperatures during the last glacial cycle (0-150 kyr BP) is a controversial issue since different proxies seem to provide conflicting informations. To obtain a complementary point of view, we use the alkenone method to estimate sea-surface temperatures and focus our work on deep-sea sediments recovered from the tropical Indian Ocean. We present alkenone data obtained in two cores which cover in detail the last deglaciation and in about twenty cores distributed between 20 degrees S and 20 degrees N that were chosen to evaluate the temperature contrast of the last glacial-interglacial transition. Our results indicate that Indian Ocean tropical temperatures remained an average within 1.5-2.5 degrees C of their present values during the last glaciation. At 10 degrees N the last deglaciation is characterized by two warming steps which is similar to the classical deglacial chronology observed in the North Atlantic area. At 20 degrees S the deglacial warming occurred at ca. 15 cal kyr BP, lagging significantly (5-4 kyr) behind the Antarctic warming, but in phase with northern hemisphere time series. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.