High sensitivity of Bering Sea winter sea ice to winter insolation and carbon dioxide over the last 5500 years

Miriam C Jones; Max Berkelhammer; Katherine J Keller; Kei Yoshimura; Matthew J Wooller

doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaz9588

High sensitivity of Bering Sea winter sea ice to winter insolation and carbon dioxide over the last 5500 years

Sci Adv. 2020 Sep 2;6(36):eaaz9588. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz9588. Print 2020 Sep.

Authors

Miriam C Jones¹, Max Berkelhammer², Katherine J Keller^{3

4}, Kei Yoshimura⁵, Matthew J Wooller⁶

Affiliations

¹ Florence Bascom Geoscience Center, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA 20192, USA. miriamjones@usgs.gov.
² Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA.
³ Florence Bascom Geoscience Center, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA 20192, USA.
⁴ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
⁵ Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
⁶ Alaska Stable Isotope Facility, College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and Institute of Northern Engineering, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK 99775, USA.

Abstract

Anomalously low winter sea ice extent and early retreat in CE 2018 and 2019 challenge previous notions that winter sea ice in the Bering Sea has been stable over the instrumental record, although long-term records remain limited. Here, we use a record of peat cellulose oxygen isotopes from St. Matthew Island along with isotope-enabled general circulation model (IsoGSM) simulations to generate a 5500-year record of Bering Sea winter sea ice extent. Results show that over the last 5500 years, sea ice in the Bering Sea decreased in response to increasing winter insolation and atmospheric CO₂, suggesting that the North Pacific is highly sensitive to small changes in radiative forcing. We find that CE 2018 sea ice conditions were the lowest of the last 5500 years, and results suggest that sea ice loss may lag changes in CO₂ concentrations by several decades.

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