A CASE OF INTERHEMISPHERIC CONCURRENCE: MAJOR CLIMATE VARIABILITY ACROSS THE NORTHEASTERN PACIFIC AND THE SOUTHERN GREAT BASIN CORRESPONDS WITH EAST ANTARCTICA OVER THREE GLACIAL CYCLES

Climate variability, defined as changes in past temperature, has been shown to be homogenous across 1500 km of East Antarctica for the last three glacial cycles (Watanabe et al. 2003); for the period 336 to 0 ka, they reported a high correlation (> 0.90) between stable isotope-derived temperatures for the Dome Fuji and Vostok Station ice cores. Examination of the deuterium record for the East Antarctic Dome C ice core (EPICA community, 2004) for this period yields correlations in excess of 0.7 with Dome Fuji and Vostok. Strong correlations (> 0.70) also exist between SST from marine cores in the northeastern Pacific (between 2N and 41N) and the oxygen-18 time series for Devils Hole, Nevada (36N), for the period 360 to 4.5 ka (Winograd et al., 2006). Furthermore, Devils Hole also is strongly correlated (>0.70) with all three Antarctic ice core records. This is not surprising in that the regional pattern of stable isotopic variation (and in reconstructed temperatures) in the East Antarctic ice cores can be seen to correspond to large-scale features found both in Devils Hole as well as in many northeastern Pacific SST time series. For example, the magnitude of the peak oxygen-18 or SST during the last interglacial is significantly greater than peak values of these parameters during the Holocene, in contrast to the nearly identical values for these interglacials displayed by benthic oxygen-18 time series of ice volume. That the shared variation between the East Antarctic records and Devils Hole is significant also can be seen in the near-identity of ice core chronologies derived by inverse methods incorporating Antarctic conditions with chronologies imported from Devils Hole by an objective algorithm (Landwehr and Winograd, 2001). The interhemispheric correspondence between Devils Hole and the East Antarctic ice cores is remarkable both because of the distance between the regions -- 114 degrees of latitude -- and because the records span three glacial cycles. An atmospheric teleconnection of tropical Pacific origin is suggested as the agent for this consistent interhemispheric-scale climatic variability