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Decadal Timescale Shift in the 14C Record of a Central Equatorial Pacific Coral

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

A G Grottoli ,
S T Gille ,
E R M Druffel  and
R B Dunbar
A G Grottoli*
Affiliation:
Department of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Pennsylvania, 240 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6316, USA.
S T Gille
Affiliation:
Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0230, USA. Email: sgille@ucsd.edu.
E R M Druffel
Affiliation:
Department of Earth System Science, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, California 92697-3100, USA. Email: edruffel@uci.edu.
R B Dunbar
Affiliation:
Department of Geological and Environmental Science, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-2115, USA. Email: dunbar@stanford.edu.
*
Corresponding author. Email: grottoli@sas.upenn.edu.
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Abstract

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Coral skeletal radiocarbon records reflect seawater ∆14C and are useful for reconstructing the history of water mass movement and ventilation in the tropical oceans. Here, we reconstructed the inter-annual variability in central equatorial Pacific surface water ∆14C from 1922–1956 using near-monthly 14C measurements in a Porites sp. coral skeleton (FI5A) from the windward side of Fanning Island (3°54′32′′N, 159°18'88′′W). The most pronounced feature in this record is a large, positive shift in the ∆14C between 1947 and 1956 that coincides with the switch of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) from a positive to a negative phase in the mid-1940s. Although the absolute ∆14C values from 1950–1955 in FI5A differ from the ∆14C values of another coral core collected from the opposite side of the island, both records show a large, positive shift in their ∆14C records at that time. The relative increase in the ∆14C of each record is consistent with the premise that a common mechanism is controlling the ∆14C records within each coral record. Overall, the Fanning ∆14C data support the notion that a significant amount of subtropical seawater is arriving at the Equator, but does not allow us to determine the mechanism for its transport.

Type
Corals and Shells
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , 2003 , pp. 91 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © The Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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