NOAA/WDS Paleoclimatology - Madagascar Speleothem Stable Isotope Data from 13200-11280 year BP

As prominent abrupt climatic events during the last deglaciation and the early Holocene, the Younger Dryas (YD) and the 8.2 ka events have been intensely discussed to reveal the relationship between their phases and intensities, and their underlying mechanisms based on massive marine and terrestrial archives. However, the related paleoclimate records with sufficient resolution and/or precise age constraints from the Southern Hemisphere, especially East Africa, are relatively sparse, hindering our comprehensive understanding about the phases of these two events. Here, we provide a precisely dated record of an aragonite-calcite stalagmite covering 11.3–13.5 ka BP from northwest Madagascar to unravel the arid conditions during the YD, in contrast to the pluvial conditions in the 8.2 ka event that has been evidenced before. Changes in austral summer precipitation related to the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) have always been interpreted to be the primary means of controlling regional rainfall amounts and thus the d18O variations in stalagmite. However, ITCZ’s meridional migration alone is not enough to interpret the opposite hydroclimatic conditions during the YD and the 8.2 ka events in northwest Madagascar. The variation in convection intensity within the ITCZ combined with the rainfall dipole mode in East Africa, and the redistribution of the duration of the ITCZ’s presence at different latitudes might be responsible for this phenomenon. In addition, sea surface temperature could play a nonnegligible role.