Reconciliation of the Devils Hole climate record with orbital forcing

Glacial cycles are in part controlled by the pattern of incident solar energy determined by the geometry of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The classic record of the penultimate deglaciation from Devils Hole, Nevada, did not reconcile the presumption of so-called orbital forcing, however, suggesting that deglaciation began ~10,000 years too early. Moseley et al. present analyses of a new set of data from Devils Hole that show that the deglaciation indeed occurred at the time expected on the basis of orbital forcing. The age offset displayed by the older samples apparently was caused by interaction with groundwater, which preferentially affected the deeper original samples but not the new shallower samples.

By Gina E. Moseley, et al.

Jan 6th, 2016