The Younger Dryas is so called because it corresponds, in the pollen record from Europe, to the latest (i.e. youngest) appearance of the Dryas octopetala pollen, an alpine flower in regions that are now far from alpine. It marks a clear period towards the end of the last ice age when the warming trend of the deglaciation in Europe particularly was interrupted for a period of about 1300 years before it got going again. There were clear glacier advances during this time and the moraines can be seen very clearly all around Europe and Scandinavia.
The clues to what caused this remarkable, if temporary, turnaround have always lain in assessing its spatial extent, the exact timing and correspondence with other events. Two recent papers have shed some welcome and potentially controversial light on the subject.
To appreciate those papers though, you need a little background. It is clear from the Greenland ice cores that the Younger Dryas was a huge event in that region – 10 to 15ºC cooling at Summit – and this is confirmed by studies of ocean sediments in the North Atlantic which also show large temperature drops (a few degrees) over this period. Particularly clear records of climate impacts are seen off Portugal and as far south as the Cariaco Basin off Venezuela. New evidence from proxy circulation tracers suggest that the North Atlantic overturning decreased significantly during the YD, possibly shutting down completely. This has all lent support to the theory, first suggested over a decade ago, that glacial meltwater interfered with the N. Atl. circulation causing an interruption of the ocean heat flow to the North. This is of course the prototype of the “ocean circulation changes imply a new ice age” meme which has been so hard to get rid of in recent years.
But how far afield did this climate change reach? The event is been clearly seen in sediments off Santa Barbara (California) and in cave records from China, but both of these areas are still in the Northern Hemisphere, and exactly what is recorded (wind speed change and precipitation amounts?) is still a little ambiguous. But what about the south?
The initial results from Antarctic ice cores at first seemed to show something very similar – the long warming through the deglaciation was interrupted by a cold reversal half way along. The relative dating was not very good at that time and it was quite plausible that the two events in Greenland and Antarctica were one and the same. When glacial advances in New Zealand were found to be around the same time, it seemed clear that the YD cooling had extended the entire length of the Atlantic! The only problem was that the favored mechanism, an ocean circulation change, no longer matched the data. Models of these shutdowns found it very hard (actually impossible) to get a cooling in the North and South at the same time. Lots of other ideas were suggested, but none that were really convincing. So scientists went on thinking that it probably was the ocean, but always with a bit of unease about the southern hemisphere results or the models.
Clarity started to emerge when new techniques for lining up the ice cores in Antarctica and Greenland were developed. One technique used the very rapid changes in methane (which could be measured in both poles) to synchronise the chronologies. The thought being that methane changes are well mixed and so large changes in one hemisphere get transmitted very quickly to the other. With this came a big surprise – the Antarctic Cold Reversal started hundreds of years before the Younger Dryas! In fact, Antarctica stopped cooling just as the YD was getting started. This was evidence of a bi-polar see-saw in the ocean – something the models did seem happy to show.
But what about the New Zealand glaciers? How did they fit in? There had been some loosely constrained pollen data that didn’t show much cooling reported in 1999, but the result was still ambiguous. This is where the first of the new papers comes in. In it, Barrows et al show with improved dating that the New Zealand peak glacial advances actually were significantly younger than the YD. These dates seem more solid that the previous estimates and are supported by nearby ocean sediment evidence for a continued warming through the YD.
So now that the southern hemisphere oddities have left the scene, does that mean we now have a full understanding of the event? Not quite. The ocean circulation theory has indeed been strengthened in recent years, but the search for a trigger continues – why did it happen when it did? As always, many ideas have been put forward – a shift in drainage pathways for Lake Agassiz from the Mississippi to the St. Lawrence, a solar trigger or a tropical Pacific trigger and now we have a brand new idea – a cometary impact.
This has been suggested by a large group of researchers who have collectively been working on archaeological sites (Clovis) in North America and who noticed a layer of charcoal at about the same time as the YD at a number of disparate sites. They claim too that within this charcoal there is significant evidence of impact ejecta, and from this they suggest that the trigger for the YD was in fact an extraterrestrial impact. This doesn’t really undermine the ocean mechanism – the comet is hypothesised to have caused significant meltwater to flow into the Atlantic and the ocean circulation changed as would be expected in the standard view. Some suggestions were made at meetings that the direct impact due to dust and smoke forcing from fires actually caused the initial YD cooling, but this doesn’t seem quite as plausible (dust falls out of the air quickly).
The researchers have however tried to link the impact with everything that was previously linked in time to the Younger Dryas – mammoth extinctions, the disappearance of the Clovis culture etc. – but it is very difficult to disentangle a direct consequence of an impact from the indirect consequence of the subsequent climate change. But these ideas are quite intriguing and they made quite a splash when announced in a coordinated session at AGU in the spring.
There are three aspects of this work that will require independent confirmation to determine whether or not this is a viable explanation. Firstly, it should be possible to find the ejecta layer almost anywhere – peat bogs, lake sediment, ice cores etc. – wherever there is material of the right age. If that is indeed found (big if), then the first part of the hypothesis might be confirmed – that there was an impact at this time. The subsequent parts are much harder: depending on where any object landed or was centered, how can one show that it produced the meltwater that presumably caused the ocean circulation change? The source to the ocean of the meltwater (be it the Arctic, St Lawrence or Hudson Bay) has been unclear for many years. Finally, how can you show that the direct effect of the hypothesised comet was responsible for any impacts, rather than the indirect effect of the ocean change? These issues will, I suspect, take a long time to resolve.
There are still some more YD mysteries though. The ocean models might have won the Southern Hemisphere round, but they still have a hard time explaining why it lasted so long, and how the rapid warming (10 or so degrees in the space of a few decades in Greenland) at the end occurred. The fact that similar events occurred all through the glacial period (Dansgaard-Oscheger events) implies that they must be fundamental to the climate system rather than a one off. An impact event doesn’t impact those mysteries at all.