It depends on the sediment rate. If it is high enough, high-resolution climate profile can be created. The usual proxies include element and isotope of carbonate shell. For the sediments, XRF scanning is suggested, which can provide continuous geochemical records in mm scale.

Thanks Liu, My research group is already involved in such studies. My curiosity is to know the maximum temporal resolution that could be achieved. Say can we get decadal resolution?

for marine sediments, its sediment rate is low and less than 10mm/ka. Centurial resolution may be more likely to get but decadal resolution is trying to achieve.

Thanks Hu, Can you please tell me any paper or methods that have been are being tried to achieve decadal resolution.

Maybe the attached classic paper could be helpful for you.

Article Haug, G. H., Hughen, K. A., Peterson, L. C., Sigman, D. M. &...

Thanks alot Liu. Highly appreciated. I will go through the paper.

Happy New year to Liu and Hu.

You may also want to consider some specialized areas. For example, the Gulf of California has regions in which laminated sediments record very short intervals of time. Here is an example of a paper on them. You will find other references in the paper:

Early Holocene decadal-scale ocean variability recorded in Gulf of California laminated sediments

Jennifer PikeAlan E. S. Kemp

Article first published online: 4 MAY 2010

DOI: 10.1029/96PA03132

Paleoceanography

Volume 12, Issue 2, pages 227–238, April 1997

Thanks Margaret.

Thank you so much.

Regards

Mahjoor

Santa Barbara Basin has annual layers for interglacials for the last 160 ka at ODP site 893. See papers by the James P Kennett-Rick Behl group. We more recently extended the record back to about 700 ka using overlapping piston cores:

Nicholson, C., J. Kennett, C. Sorlien, ##S. Hopkins, R. Behl, W. Normark, R. Sliter, T. Hill, D. Pak, A. Schimmelmann, K. Cannariato, and the SBCore team, 2006, Santa Barbara Basin study extends global climate record, Eos (Transactions of American Geophysical Union), 87, n.21, p.205, 208 (2006).

Oxygen isotopes (from forams, I think) were used by Kennett lab combined with our group (Nicholson, Behl, me) to come up with a precise age model: results shown in a thesis.

Marshall, C. J. (2012), Sedimentation in an active fold and thrust belt, from 1 Ma to present, Santa Barbara Channel, California, M.S. thesis, Dept. of Geol., California State Univ. Long Beach, Long Beach, California.

http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/

http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#abstract?dispub=1507771

Parts of the cores were laminated (varved?), and we cored the Lava Creek ash (Yellowstone) which is precisely dated elsewhere, so can get decadal resolution relative to things like the ash.

I've forgotten how close to actual ages one can get by matching the high-resolution oxygen isotopic record to the global curve.

Sedimentation rate is on order of 1 mm/yr for last 160 ka, but is up the several times more than that in the basin for certain earlier intervals.

Chris Sorlien

Dear Lambert

I have already generated sub-decadal resolution data from speleothems. However my main focus in this project is to derive decadal resolution climatic signal from marine cores.

I value and thank you for sharing your opinion

Best regards

Mahjoor

Dear Álvarez

Thanks for sharing that information. I am sure I will also get at-least multi-decadal resolution from the cores i intend to work on.

Thanks again.

Best regards

Mahjoor

Dear Christopher

This indeed is very informative and helpful for me.

Thank you so much.

Best regards

Mahjoor

The original question asked if we could get decadal, or multidacadal

resolution.

Perhaps, but changes in climate usually take hundreds to thousands of years

to make significant changes.

For example about 12,000 years ago the continental ice sheets began

melting, and the duration was about 4,000 years ( 12,000 years ago to

8,000 years ago ). The Mountain glaciers also melted and receeded

in this time period, and the oceans became deeper by about 120 meters.

This " raised " the elevation of the oceans, but it also " lowered " the

elevation of the continents relative to the atmosphere.

This changed the climate at all land elevations on the planet.

We are now beginning the next phase of the melting, melting of perma-

frost, less polar ice, melting of Greenland Ice, and more sea level rise.

Climate change is a very protracted process with periods of warming and

cooling.

You might want to look at north to south, and south to north migration

of various types of Formanifera in sediments.

Dear Clark

You seem to be referring to Younger Dryas, probably. While I do agree that there are centennial to millennial changes in climate, we can not ignore the decadal to multi-decadal changes established from speleothem and other high resolution proxies. Moreover, higher resolution is expected to help us understand the timing of such abrupt changes.

My basic idea was to understand various methods/ proxies that could be applied to marine sediments to get the highest possible resolution climatic data from them.

I am thankful to you throwing more light on this topic and acknowledge the same.

Thank you so much

Mahjoor

Hi Mahjoor,

In marine settings, the higher resolution you can get is indeed from coral (from fairly low latitude environments) and laminated sediments. In both cases, you can get annual or multi-annual resolution records, at least in theory.

From laminated sediments, there is a wide array of proxies that can be used, and indeed the Santa Barbara Basin is probably the best of such repositories studied. As Christopher mentioned, the ODP site 893 spans about 160 ka with laminated intervals during interglacials, and more recently a "Mona Lisa Suite" of piston cores were recovered with a potential of going back as far as 500 ka (see Eos, Vol. 87, No. 21, 23 May 2006).

There are other sites with laminated sediments (see for instance Fig. 1 in Soutar and Crill 1977, Geological Society of America Bulletin;88;1161-1172). At higher latitudes, a lot of fjords with sills that prevent (or limit) bottom water ventilation also have laminated sediments, although they usually only span the current interglacial. To my knowledge, Saanich Inlet (see ODP site 1034) and Effingham Inlet on Vancouver Island are some of the best studied.

Then, if you want some decent temporal resolution from marine cores, even if the facies is not laminated, you need to look for settings with high sedimentation rates, which usually occur close to the coast (more terrestrial input) and in highly productive areas (especially if you are looking for forams or other microfossils in the sediments).

One thing to keep in mind: the further back you go in time, the greater the uncertainty in the dating, unless you can anchor your chronology with tephras or other well-dated horizons.

Finally, for high resolution studies, anything that involves microscope work is quite time-consuming, so many studies focusing on laminated sediments deal with proxies that are "faster" to measure, such as sediment color (as a proxy for rainfall or origin of clay particles) or geochemical data. If you want to stick to forams, it might be a good idea to study your core at a fairly coarse resolution first, and then target the intervals of interest (where abrupt change seems to have occurred) for higher resolution.

Sorry for the long answer... Hope it helps!

Dear Manuel

Thank you much for the elaborative answer.

This indeed is very much helpful.

Thank again...

Some areas of high sedimentation rates occur also in the open ocean. For example, in our diatom based reconstructions from Iceland Basin in the subpolar North Atlantic, we reached a bi-annual resolution for the last 230 years, and decadal resolution for the last 2800 years.

See: Miettinen et al. 2011. Climate Dynamics 36: 533-543.

Miettinen et al. 2012. Journal of Climate 25: 4205-4219.

Dear Arto

These are indeed excellent research works.

Thank you so much for taking time to reply here and add to my knowledge.

There will be two IODP cruises in the Bay of Bengal (North Indian Ocean). If selected I intend to focus on retrieving such a high resolution data for last deglaciation, especially the Termination 1a and 1b. This is expected to understand:

1. Low to high latitude ISM dynamics vis-à-vis ITCZ changes.

2. Timing of actual Termination in low latitudes and its relation to Ice-cores records.

3. Relation between Indian summer monsoon and East Asian summer monsoon.

Thanks again for your reply.

Regards

Mahjoor

Hello...

I have generated foraminiferal isotope record from the Southern Ocean for the last nearly 100 kyr. But the resolution which we are getting is like millennial scale or we can say sub-millennial scale. This high resolution record is showing the events such as ACR, antarctic warming events and Termination 1.

Thanks Manoj

My motive is to retrieve decadal resolution.

Thanks again.

Best wishes.

Hello Mahjoor

I think many of the previous authors have noted the potential for some really high resolution marine records to be possible, especially where laminated sediments are preserved and/or where very high sediment accumulation rates occur (e.g. some sites around Antarctica). I worked in the Gulf of California and here we have seasonal laminations preserved through the Holocene and into the last glacial stage: the size of the laminae meant that annual resolution analyses were possible (but these are time consuming!). My own work reconstructed decadal and centennial scale variability across the last deglaciation:

McClymont et al. (2012) Sea-surface temperature records of Termination 1 in the Gulf of California: challenges for seasonal and inter-annual analogues of tropical Pacific climate change. Paleoceanography, 27:PA2202.

See also recent work by Laetitia Pichevin, John Barron, and Heather Cheshire on the Gulf of California cores for high resolution analyses too.

Best wishes.

Dear Erin

You are doing a great job. Thanks for the help.

I am actually interested to test the work of Steffenson 2008 in Science "High-Resolution Greenland Ice Core Data Show Abrupt Climate Change Happens in

Few Years". Since the Ice core belong to high latitudes, It will be highly interesting to study it in low latitutes/ tropics. This will require of-course require laminated sediment core and a high accuracy chronology. Since you have studies Termination 1 in your Paleoceanography paper I think you can focus it to the specific intervals of Termination 1a and Termination 1b.

Once again thanks.

Best wishes.

Mahjoor

Time resolution depends on the sedimentation rate in a selected core, if you need to reconstruct meaningful decadal resolution record you should have sed rate of 0.2mm per year.

Dear Dr. Naidu

Thank you so much for the answer. I hope Mahanadi Basin in Bay of Bengal fetches such high sedimentation rate.

Best regards

Mahjoor

Yes, Mahanadi basin has high sedimentation during Holocene.

That is a good news. I hope to get selected for coming IODP program in BoB and work on specific abrupt climatic events.

Thanks again.

Best regards

Mahjoor

Based on a construction project that I worked on several years ago, the

marine basin sedimentation rate was between 4.5mm and 5.5 mm

per year with thick light colored sediments alternating with very thin

( 0.5 mm or less ) dark layers. Since the sediments were turned up

to a vertical orientation, and we had to excavate back into the bank

for a distance of several feet, the very uniform nature of the deposition

cycle became apparent. I estimated an exposed length that would

include about 150,000 years of marine deposition onto the bottom

of the Western interior Seaway at a location about halfway between

Golden Colorado, and Boulder Colorado where Colorado State Highway

# 93 crosses the Union Pacific Railway lines.

Since the total deposition thickness from 300,000,000 years ago to

to 70,000,000 years ago ( delta T = 210,000,000 years ) produced

two miles of total accumulated deposition, which is now

mostly turned up vertical, I thought why not find out what the average

deposition rate really was.

For two miles: 2 x 5280 x 12 x 2.54 x 10 = 3,218,688 mm / 5mm

is only 6,437,376 years ? of the 210 million years.

The ratio is about 32.624 to 1, so is the dark stripe something that

occurs every 32.6 years apart on average ? Why is it dark in color ?

I thought the dark color was annual winter cold spell, but if it occurs

once every 32 to 33 years, why is it dark ( undigested by micro-organisms ),

and no deposited calcium in the thin layer ?

Not clear whether you have precise dating of some sort or you assume annual layers. 5 mm/year is really fast for marine. You can get that in deltas, and locally in the deepest part of basins near the North Anatolian fault near Istanbul, and 3 mm/yr at ODP site 1015 in Santa Monica Basin, California. But these high rates do not last too long in any one place. I suspect that if you are correct about the 5 mm/year, it indeed did not last more than a couple million years, if that.

Dear Clark

I completely agree with Christopher. Can you please tell us how you established the chronology. I also suspect if two mile core could be and has been retrieved?

Regarding 32-33 year cycle, it as been reported by many workers including me as solar and or ocean atmospheric phenomenon. However it is yet not so clearly understood. You can find more details about the cycle in my most recent paper based on speleothem.

Since the strata is turned up vertically, the depth is a horizontal measurement

from the base of the mountains out into the plains until the material

changes from clay layers to gravel and A eolian layers. The Clay includes

the Benton Shale, and the Dakota formation, and the Fountain formation

( sandstone )

I had advocated the longitudinal coring of cave formations back in 1968

when I was actively exploring caves in Southern New Mexico, USA,

( when I was much younger ), and since we have some very tall

Stalagmites ( up to 105 feet tall ), In Cottonwood Cave, Eddie County,

New Mexico, a long longitudinal core could have several million years

of data on climate events. I also thought that signature events, like

periodic volcanic eruptions, or impacts being recorded in the individual

layers of the stalagmite.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, the United States passed the Cave Protection

Act, so no coring of Cave Formations is currently allowed. It is important to

core the formation, leave the formation in place, and plug the hole, while not

allowing oil from anything including your hand to get on the formation,

or it will stop growing.

The cores should be archived at Prestigious Universities, or National

Museums, after having them analysed using a spectroscopic analysis,

and recording and publishing the results on the Internet.

The thickness of the layers between 4.5 mm and 5.5 mm are very

uniform layer after, layer, after layer for the length of the wall. I also

thought they seem thick for annual layers, and since it was so

warm in the Cretaceous, perhaps winter die offs of micro organisms

only occurred every 32 or 33 years, so dark layers only occur when

the nutrients settle to the bottom of the oceans, and are not eaten

by microorganisms. Anyway the wall, and the excavation was several

hundred feet long to build the retaining wall under the bridge.

Reading strata is very easy when the strata gets turned up from

Horizontal to Vertical, and large equipment excavates a near vertical

face perpendicular to the strata.

If these are really associated with Sun Spot Cycles, why is it

an odd number like three 11 year cycles? Tri-cyclical ?

This is puzzling.

I also remember from the National Speleological Society, that formation

growth is roughly 5,000 years to one inch of growth of the Speleothem.

Since there is 2.54 cm in an inch, 25.4 mm per inch,

that means it takes 197 years to add 1 mm of new material to

any speleothem.

1/5000 th of one inch is about the thickness of one layer of paint, which

is vastly thinner than what Mahjoor Lone is reporting. Since formations

grow by depositing crystals in suspension, during the evaporation of

water from the surface in an atmosphere near 100 % humidity, and the

amount of material dissolved, or in suspension is extremely tiny, and

I spent a lot of year exploring caves, and observing,

perhaps you should take another look at your sectioned speleothem

using a microscope.

There might be several 10's of 11 year cycles , not three 11 year cycles.

Take a look at the 542 year cycle of the forces of the Planets on the Sun,

and look for a Solar Minimum every 49 1/3 cycles of 11 years.

Perhaps the attached might give an idea or two.

Article Quantifying Assemblage Turnover and Species Contributions at...

I suggestion that you can test the chemscial elements change trend by XRF scaner machine. The equipment is very good, which is very quikly and high resoultion. 1 m core sample only spend about 3 hours will be completed the test and the data interval for 1 mm. If there are some abrupt climatic changes show by chemsical elements, you can decied do any other proxy analysis.