Identification

Title

Climate responses to the splitting of a supercontinent: Implications for the breakup of pangea

Abstract

Reconstructing deep time climate often relies on a limited number of data points, which can hinder inference of the large‐scale climate state. Here we use an Earth system model with idealized boundary conditions to simulate climate responses to paleogeographic changes associated with the breakup of a supercontinent. After the supercontinent splits, weaker tropical easterlies occur in the larger ocean basin, which dampens the Walker circulation and warms the equatorial ocean through reduced upwelling. Additionally, cloud formation increases across the midlatitude ocean, causing locally cooler sea surface temperatures. Over land, there is dramatic tropical cooling post-breakup due to enhanced moisture and cloud formation. Consequently, the latitudinal temperature gradient responses over land and ocean oppose each other, which makes inferring large scale climate changes from spatially spare proxy records particularly challenging in this scenario. Our findings emphasize the tight coupling between geography and planetary-scale climate dynamics in the tropics and subtropics.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7bg2s3p

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2019-06-16T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact