Abstract. Current climate and environmental changes strongly affect shallow marine and coastal areas like the Baltic Sea. This has created a need for a context to understand the severity and potential outcomes of such changes. The context can be derived from paleoenvironmental records during periods when comparable events happened in the past. In this study, we explore how varying bottom water conditions across a large hydrographic gradient in the Baltic Sea affect benthic foraminiferal faunal assemblages and the geochemical composition of their calcite tests. We have conducted both morphological and molecular analyses of the faunas and we evaluate how the chemical signatures of the bottom waters are recorded in the tests of several species of benthic foraminifera. We focus on two locations, one in the Kattegat (western Baltic Sea) and one in Hanö Bay (southern Baltic Sea). We show that seawater Mn∕Ca, Mg∕Ca, and Ba∕Ca (Mn∕Casw, Mg∕Casw, and Ba∕Casw) variations are mainly controlled by dissolved oxygen concentration and salinity. Their respective imprints on the foraminiferal calcite demonstrate the potential of Mn∕Ca as a proxy for hypoxic conditions, and Ba∕Ca as a proxy for salinity in enclosed basins such as the Baltic Sea. The traditional use of Mg∕Ca as a proxy to reconstruct past seawater temperatures is not recommended in the region, as it may be overprinted by the large variations in salinity (specifically on Bulimina marginata), Mg∕Casw, and possibly also the carbonate system. Salinity is the main factor controlling the faunal assemblages: a much more diverse fauna occurs in the higher-salinity (∼32) Kattegat than in the low-salinity (∼15) Hanö Bay. Molecular identification shows that only Elphidium clavatum occurs at both locations, but other genetic types of both genera Elphidium and Ammonia are restricted to either low- or high-salinity locations. The combination of foraminiferal geochemistry and environmental parameters demonstrates that in a highly variable setting like the Baltic Sea, it is possible to separate different environmental impacts on the foraminiferal assemblages and therefore use Mn∕Ca, Mg∕Ca, and Ba∕Ca to reconstruct how specific conditions may have varied in the past.
Salinity variations in restricted basins like the Baltic Sea can alter their vulnerability to hypoxia (i.e., bottom water oxygen concentrations <2 mg/l) and can affect the burial of phosphorus (P), a key nutrient for marine organisms. We combine porewater and solid-phase geochemistry, microanalysis of sieved sediments (including XRD and synchrotron-based XAS), and foraminiferal δ 18 O and δ 13 C analyses to reconstruct the bottom water salinity, redox conditions, and P burial in the Ångermanälven estuary, Bothnian Sea. Our sediment records were retrieved during the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Baltic Sea Paleoenvironment Expedition 347 in 2013. We demonstrate that bottom waters in the Ångermanälven estuary became anoxic upon the intrusion of seawater in the early Holocene, like in the central Bothnian Sea. The subsequent refreshening and reoxygenation, which was caused by gradual isostatic uplift, promoted P burial in the sediment in the form of Mn-rich vivianite. Vivianite authigenesis in the surface sediments of the more isolated part of the estuary ultimately ceased, likely due to continued refreshening and an associated decline in productivity and P supply to the sediment. The observed shifts in environmental conditions also created conditions for postdepositional formation of authigenic vivianite, and possibly apatite formation, at ∼8 m composite depth. These salinityrelated changes in redox conditions and P burial are highly relevant in light of current climate change. The results specifically highlight that increased freshwater input linked to global warming may enhance coastal P retention, thereby contributing to oligotrophication in both coastal and adjacent open waters.
Abstract. Sediment records recovered from the Baltic Sea during Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 347 provide a unique opportunity to study paleoenvironmental and climate change in central and northern Europe. Such studies contribute to a better understanding of how environmental parameters change in continental shelf seas and enclosed basins. Here we present a multi-proxy-based reconstruction of paleotemperature (both marine and terrestrial), paleosalinity, and paleoecosystem changes from the Little Belt (Site M0059) over the past ∼ 8000 years and evaluate the applicability of inorganic-and organic-based proxies in this particular setting.All salinity proxies (diatoms, aquatic palynomorphs, ostracods, diol index) show that lacustrine conditions occurred in the Little Belt until ∼ 7400 cal yr BP. A connection to the Kattegat at this time can thus be excluded, but a direct connection to the Baltic Proper may have existed. The transition to the brackish-marine conditions of the Littorina Sea stage (more saline and warmer) occurred within ∼ 200 years when the connection to the Kattegat became established after ∼ 7400 cal yr BP. The different salinity proxies used here generally show similar trends in relative changes in salinity, but often do not allow quantitative estimates of salinity.Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. U. Kotthoff et al.: Little Belt multi-proxy comparisonThe reconstruction of water temperatures is associated with particularly large uncertainties and variations in absolute values by up to 8 • C for bottom waters and up to 16 • C for surface waters. Concerning the reconstruction of temperature using foraminiferal Mg / Ca ratios, contamination by authigenic coatings in the deeper intervals may have led to an overestimation of temperatures. Differences in results based on the lipid paleothermometers (long chain diol index and TEX L 86 ) can partly be explained by the application of modern-day proxy calibrations to intervals that experienced significant changes in depositional settings: in the case of our study, the change from freshwater to marine conditions. Our study shows that particular caution has to be taken when applying and interpreting proxies in coastal environments and marginal seas, where water mass conditions can experience more rapid and larger changes than in open ocean settings. Approaches using a multitude of independent proxies may thus allow a more robust paleoenvironmental assessment.
Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 347 aimed to retrieve sediments from different settings of the Baltic Sea, encompassing the last interglacial-glacial cycle to address scientific questions along four main research themes: 1. Climate and sea level dynamics of marine isotope Stage (MIS) 5, including onsets and terminations; 2. Complexities of the latest glacial, MIS 4-MIS 2; 3. Glacial and Holocene (MIS 2-MIS 1) climate forcing; and 4. Deep biosphere in Baltic Sea Basin (BSB) sediments. These objectives were accomplished by drilling in six subbasins: (1) the gateway of the BSB (Anholt), where we focused on sediments from MIS 6-5 and MIS 2-1; (2) a subbasin in the southwestern BSB (Little Belt) that possibly holds a unique MIS 5 record; (3, 4) two subbasins in the south (Bornholm Basin and Hanö Bay) that may hold long complete records from MIS 4-2; (5) a 450 m deep subbasin in the central Baltic (Landsort Deep) that promises to contain a thick and continuous record of the last ~14,000 y; and (6) a subbasin in the very north (Ångermanälven River estuary) that contains a uniquely varved (annually deposited) sediment record of the last 10,000 y. These six areas were expected to contain sediment sequences representative of the last ~140,000 y, with paleoenvironmental information relevant on a semicontinental scale because the Baltic Sea drains an area four times as large as the basin itself. The location of the BSB in the heartland of a recurrently waning and waxing ice sheet, the Scandinavian Ice Sheet, has resulted in a complex development: repeated glaciations of different magnitudes, sensitive responses to sea level and gateway threshold changes, large shifts in sedimentation patterns, and high sedimentation rates. Its position also makes it a unique link between Eurasian and northwest European terrestrial records. Therefore, the sediments of this largest European intracontinental basin form a rare archive of climate evolution over the latest glacial cycle. High sedimentation rates provide an excellent opportunity to reconstruct climatic variability of global importance at a unique resolution from a marine-brackish setting. Comparable sequences cannot be retrieved anywhere in the surrounding onshore regions. Furthermore, and crucially, the large variability (salinity, climate, sedimentation, and oxygenation) that the BSB has under
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