Deep and bottom water export from the Southern Ocean to the Pacific over the past 38 million years : 38 MYR SOUTH PACIFIC WATER MASS HISTORY

Since 65 million years ago (Ma), Earth's climate has undergone a significant and complex evolution, the finer details of which are now coming to light through investigations of deep-sea sediment cores. This evolution includes gradual trends of warming and cooling driven by tectonic processes on time scales of 10(5) to 10(7) years, rhythmic or periodic cycles driven by orbital processes with 10(4)- to 10(6)-year cyclicity, and rare rapid aberrant shifts and extreme climate transients with durations of 10(3) to 10(5) years. Here, recent progress in defining the evolution of global climate over the Cenozoic Era is reviewed. We focus primarily on the periodic and anomalous components of variability over the early portion of this era, as constrained by the latest generation of deep-sea isotope records. We also consider how this improved perspective has led to the recognition of previously unforeseen mechanisms for altering climate.

A deep-sea temperature record for the past 50 million years has been produced from the magnesium/calcium ratio (Mg/Ca) in benthic foraminiferal calcite. The record is strikingly similar in form to the corresponding benthic oxygen isotope (delta(18)O) record and defines an overall cooling of about 12 degrees C in the deep oceans with four main cooling periods. Used in conjunction with the benthic delta(18)O record, the magnesium temperature record indicates that the first major accumulation of Antarctic ice occurred rapidly in the earliest Oligocene (34 million years ago) and was not accompanied by a decrease in deep-sea temperatures.