NOAA/WDS Paleoclimatology - Global TEX86 Surface Sediment Database

Quantitative estimates of past temperature changes are a cornerstone of paleoclimatology. For a number of marine sediment-based proxies, the accuracy and precision of past temperature reconstructions depends on a spatial calibration of modern surface sediment measurements to overlying water temperatures. Here, we present a database of 1095 surface sediment measurements of TEX86, a temperature proxy based on the relative cyclization of marine archaeal glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether (GDGT) lipids. The dataset is archived in a machine-readable format with geospatial information, fractional abundances of lipids (if available), and metadata. We use this new database to update surface and subsurface temperature calibration models for TEX86 and demonstrate the applicability of the TEX86 proxy to past temperature prediction. The TEX86 database confirms that surface sediment GDGT distribution has a strong relationship to temperature, which accounts for over 70% of the variance in the data. Future efforts, made possible by the data presented here, will seek to identify variables with secondary relationships to GDGT distributions, such as archaeal community composition.