Meltwater Pulse1A Triggered an Extreme Cooling Event: Evidence From Southern China

Meltwater Pulse 1A injection into the North Atlantic coincided with the BOlling warming event, despite climate model simulations indicating that the Meltwater Pulse 1A should have inevitably lead to an extreme cooling in the northern hemisphere. However, so far no cooling event has been found in paleoclimate records responding to Meltwater Pulse 1A. Here we reconstruct winter temperature based on sedimentary diatoms from Huguangyan Maar Lake in tropical China. The results show that winter temperature dropped by at least 6 degrees C within similar to 100 years at 14.8 0.02 ka BP, coeval with the onset of Meltwater Pulse 1A, within dating uncertainty. We argue that Meltwater Pulse 1A weakened the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), resulting in abrupt severe cooling in the Northern Hemisphere that caused a severe winter temperature drop in East Asia by strengthening the winter monsoon. We propose that extreme cooling in winter temperature triggered the BOlling warming by stopping the freshwater release from the ice-sheet, triggering the AMOC to recover quickly and causing the BOlling event as an overshoot under gradual forcing.

Automated summary

Research has found that the injection of Meltwater Pulse 1A into the North Atlantic weakened the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and caused severe winter temperature drop in the Northern Hemisphere. This extreme cooling triggered the BOlling warming event and led to the recovery of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.