Extreme weather events recorded by daily to hourly resolution biogeochemical proxies of marine giant clam shells

Hong Yan; Chengcheng Liu; Zhisheng An; Wei Yang; Yuanjian Yang; Ping Huang; Shican Qiu; Pengchao Zhou; Nanyu Zhao; Haobai Fei; Xiaolin Ma; Ge Shi; John Dodson; Jialong Hao; Kefu Yu; Gangjian Wei; Yanan Yang; Zhangdong Jin; Weijian Zhou

doi:10.1073/pnas.1916784117

Extreme weather events recorded by daily to hourly resolution biogeochemical proxies of marine giant clam shells

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Mar 31;117(13):7038-7043. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1916784117. Epub 2020 Mar 16.

Authors

Hong Yan^{1

2

3}, Chengcheng Liu⁴, Zhisheng An^{1

5

6}, Wei Yang⁷, Yuanjian Yang⁸, Ping Huang⁹, Shican Qiu¹⁰, Pengchao Zhou⁴, Nanyu Zhao⁴, Haobai Fei⁴, Xiaolin Ma⁴, Ge Shi⁴, John Dodson⁴, Jialong Hao¹¹, Kefu Yu¹², Gangjian Wei¹³, Yanan Yang¹³, Zhangdong Jin⁴, Weijian Zhou⁴

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 710061 Xi'an, China; yanhong@ieecas.cn anzs@loess.llqg.ac.cn yangw@mail.iggcas.ac.cn.
² Center for Excellence in Quaternary Science and Global Change, 710061 Xi'an, China.
³ Institute of Global Environmental Change, Xi'an Jiaotong University, 710049 Xi'an, China.
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 710061 Xi'an, China.
⁵ Open Studio for Oceanic-Continental Climate and Environment Changes, Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, 266237 Qingdao, China.
⁶ Interdisciplinary Research Center of Earth Science Frontier, Beijing Normal University, 100875 Beijing, China.
⁷ Key Laboratory of Earth and Planetary Physics, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100029 Beijing, China; yanhong@ieecas.cn anzs@loess.llqg.ac.cn yangw@mail.iggcas.ac.cn.
⁸ School of Atmospheric Physics, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, 210044 Nanjing, China.
⁹ Center for Monsoon System Research, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190 Beijing, China.
¹⁰ Department of Geophysics, College of the Geology Engineering and Geomatics, Chang'an University, 710054 Xi'an, China.
¹¹ Key Laboratory of Earth and Planetary Physics, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100029 Beijing, China.
¹² Coral Reef Research Center of China, Guangxi University, 530004 Nanning, China.
¹³ State Key Laboratory of Isotope Geochemistry, Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 510640 Guangzhou, China.

Abstract

Paleoclimate research has built a framework for Earth's climate changes over the past 65 million years or even longer. However, our knowledge of weather-timescale extreme events (WEEs, also named paleoweather), which usually occur over several days or hours, under different climate regimes is almost blank because current paleoclimatic records rarely provide information with temporal resolution shorter than monthly scale. Here we show that giant clam shells (Tridacna spp.) from the tropical western Pacific have clear daily growth bands, and several 2-y-long (from January 29, 2012 to December 9, 2013) daily to hourly resolution biological and geochemical records, including daily growth rate, hourly elements/Ca ratios, and fluorescence intensity, were obtained. We found that the pulsed changes of these ultra-high-resolution proxy records clearly matched with the typical instrumental WEEs, for example, tropical cyclones during the summer-autumn and cold surges during the winter. When a tropical cyclone passes through or approaches the sampling site, the growth rate of Tridacna shell decreases abruptly due to the bad weather. Meanwhile, enhanced vertical mixing brings nutrient-enriched subsurface water to the surface, resulting in a high Fe/Ca ratio and strong fluorescence intensity (induced by phytoplankton bloom) in the shell. Our results demonstrate that Tridacna shell has the potential to be used as an ultra-high-resolution archive for paleoweather reconstructions. The fossil shells living in different geological times can be built as a Geological Weather Station network to lengthen the modern instrumental data and investigate the WEEs under various climate conditions.

Keywords: Tridacna shell; biogeochemical proxies; daily growth bands; ultra-high resolution; weather-timescale extreme events.

Publication types

Evaluation Study
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Animals
Bivalvia / chemistry*
Bivalvia / growth & development*
Extreme Weather*
Paleontology / methods*