A possible record of the Younger Dryas event in deep-sea sediments of the Southern Ocean (Pacific sector)

The oxygen isotope record combined with radiocarbon dating from two deep-sea cores collected along a transect between New Zealand and the Ross Sea are used to establish a reliable chronostratigraphy for the last 14 kyr. After an integrated geochemical and micropaleontological analysis in this timeframe we detected a cooling interval dated between 12.5 cal kyr BP and 11.4 cal kyr BP. The age control suggests that this event started 1.5 kyr after the onset of the Antarctic Cold Reversal previously observed in several Antarctic ice cores. We infer that the observed cool event corresponds to the Younger Dryas event defined in Northern Europe. This suggests that climate change recorded in this sector of the Southern Hemisphere still shows some synchronicity with Northern Hemisphere variations and that the decoupling of climate change between the two hemispheres likely occurred south of the Polar Front. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.