Tracking δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O fluctuations uncovers stable modes and key patterns of paleoclimate

Abstract

The examination of fluctuations in the correlations between ${\delta }^{13}$${\delta }^{13}$C and ${\delta }^{18}$${\delta }^{18}$O is of significant importance for the reconstruction of the Earth’s climate history. A key challenge in paleoclimatology is finding a suitable method to represent the correlated fluctuation system between ${\delta }^{13}$${\delta }^{13}$C and ${\delta }^{18}$${\delta }^{18}$O. The method must be able to handle data sets with missing or inaccurate values, while still retaining the full range of dynamic information about the system. The non-linear and complex correlations between ${\delta }^{13}$${\delta }^{13}$C and ${\delta }^{18}$${\delta }^{18}$O poses a challenge in developing reliable and interpretable approaches. The transition network, which involves embedding the ${\delta }^{13}$${\delta }^{13}$C and ${\delta }^{18}$${\delta }^{18}$O sequence into the network using phase space reconstruction, is a coarse-grained based approach. This approach is well-suited to nonlinear, complex dynamic systems, and is particularly adept at emerging knowledge from low-quality datasets. We have effectively represented the fluctuations in the correlation between ${\delta }^{13}$${\delta }^{13}$C and ${\delta }^{18}$${\delta }^{18}$O since $66$$66$ million years ago (Ma) using a system of complex network. This system, which has topological dynamical structures, is able to uncover the stable modes and key patterns in Cenozoic climate dynamics. Our findings could help to improve climate models and predictions of future climate change.

Keywords

Cenozoic climate dynamics / Correlation analysis / Complex network / Coarse-grained methods / Phase space reconstruction

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Shifeng Sun: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Data curation, Visualization , Writing – original draft. Haiying Wang: Supervision, Conceptualization, Investigation, Resources, Methodology, Data curation, Validation, Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition. Yongjian Huang: Writing – review & editing, Data curation, Funding acquisition.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to Prof. M. Santosh, Dr. Yirang Jang and other anonymous reviewers for their constructive and substantive comments on our paper, which have considerably improved its presentation and quality. This work is supported by 2022 Subject Development Research Fund Project of China University of Geosciences, Beijing (Grant No. 2022XK211) and 2023 Graduate Innovation Fund Project of China University of Geosciences, Beijing (Grant No. YB2023YC014). This research is also supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42174149 and No. 42272134).

Supplementary data

The following are the Supplementary data to this article:

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All the data analyzed in our work can be accessed through this website (accessed on 2023-11-29):www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.aba6853/suppl_file/aba6853_tables_s8_s34.xlsx. This is taken from the data by Westerhold et al. (2020).

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