Ice core nitrous oxide over the past 2000 years

DOI

The continuous growth of atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O) is of concern for its potential role in global warming and future stratospheric ozone destruction. Climate feedbacks that enhance N2O emissions in response to global warming are not well understood, and past records of N2O from ice cores are not sufficiently well resolved to examine the underlying climate-N2O feedbacks on societally relevant time scales. Here, we present a new high-resolution and high-precision N2O reconstruction obtained from the Greenland NEEM (North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling) and the Antarctic Styx Glacier ice cores. Covering the N2O history of the past two millennia, our reconstruction shows a centennial-scale variability of ~10 ppb. A pronounced minimum at ~600 CE coincides with the reorganizations of tropical hydroclimate and ocean productivity changes. Comparisons with proxy records suggest association of centennial- to millennial-scale variations in N2O with changes in tropical and subtropical land hydrology and marine productivity.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.923434
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GB006568
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.923434
Provenance
Creator Ryu, Yeongjun; Ahn, Jinho; Yang, Ji-Woong ORCID logo; Brook, Edward J; Timmermann, Axel ORCID logo; Blunier, Thomas ORCID logo; Hur, Soondo; Kim, Seong-Joong ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2020
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Language English
Resource Type Publication Series of Datasets; Collection
Format application/zip
Size 2 datasets
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-51.060W, -73.867S, 163.700E, 77.450N)
Temporal Coverage Begin 2009-05-01T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2009-08-20T00:00:00Z