It has long been recognized that the transition from the last glacial to the present interglacial was punctuated by a brief and intense return to cold conditions. This extraordinary event, referred to by European palynologists as the Younger Dryas, was centered in the northern Atlantic basin. Evidence is accumulating that it may have been initiated and terminated by changes in the mode of operation of the northern Atlantic Ocean. Further, it appears that these mode changes may have been triggered by diversions of glacial meltwater between the Mississippi River and the St. Lawrence River drainage systems. We report here Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon results on two strategically located deep‐sea cores. One provides a chronology for surface water temperatures in the northern Atlantic and the other for the meltwater discharge from the Mississippi River. Our objective in obtaining these results was to strengthen our ability to correlate the air temperature history for the northern Atlantic basin with the meltwater history for the Laurentian ice sheet.

No abstract

No abstract

Radiocarbon ages for benthic and planktonic foraminifera from the late glacial sections of two Atlantic and two Pacific cores are reported. The differences for benthic‐planktonic pairs suggest that the radiocarbon age for deep Atlantic water was somewhat larger than today's (i.e., 600±250, as opposed to 400 years) and that the radiocarbon age for deep Pacific water was also slightly larger than today's (2100±400, as opposed to 1600, years). Our results suggest that during glacial time, the deep Pacific was, as it is today, significantly depleted in radiocarbon relative to the deep Atlantic. As many questions remain unanswered regarding the reliability of this approach, these conclusions must be considered to be preliminary.

ABSTRACT. Macrofossils of terrestrial plants have been picked from a sediment core taken in Lake Lobsigen, a small lake on the Western Swiss Plateau. The sediments were previously analyzed for pollen composition, plant and animal macrofossils, and stable isotopes. Plant macrofossils were selected near pollen zone boundaries in Late Glacial and early Postglacial sediment for 14C dating by AMS. In the same lake carbonate and gyttja (aquatic plant) samples were dated by decay counting. The dates on terrestrial material are generally younger than those on carbonate and gyttja, ie, material reflecting the 14C/C ratio of dissolved bicarbonate in lake water. This is probably due to a contribution of dissolved limestone carbonate and thus a somewhat reduced 14C/C, ratio in the lake's water (hard water effect).