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Science 5 September 2003:
Vol. 301. no. 5638, pp. 1336 - 1337
DOI: 10.1126/science.1088626
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Perspectives

Also see the archival list of Science's Compass: Enhanced Perspectives

PALEOCLIMATE:
Enhanced: What Drove Past Teleconnections?

Frank Sirocko

Ice core records from Greenland and Antarctica and sediment records from the world's oceans have shown that over the past 100,000 years, climate has varied substantially across the globe. In his Perspective, Sirocko asks what drove these--sometimes very rapid--climate oscillations. He highlights the report of Burns et al., whose monsoon record from the Indian Ocean shows strong similarities with ice core records from Greenland. Sirocko argues that the large areas of homogeneous sea surface temperature in the cold circum-Antarctic current and in the warm-water masses of the low latitudes must have played an important role in linking climate forcing between distant parts of the world. The much smaller North Atlantic region may not have played as large a role as is traditionally assumed in climate studies.

The author is at the Institute for Geoscience, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, 55099 Mainz, Germany. E-mail: sirocko{at}uni-mainz.de

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)