Abstract
Although there is evidence for Milankovitch cycles in deep-sea sediments from the Pleistocene1–4 and Upper Miocene5, the origin of orbital eccentricity cycles in these records is controversial5–14. Recent spectral analyses15,16 of non-glacial climatic records of mid-Cretaceous and early Mesozoic exhibit the dominance of 100-and 400-kyr eccentricity cycles and exclude the possibility that the above periodicities originate from the internal variability of ice sheets. Here I present the Walsh spectrum analyses of 10 Myr oxygen (δ18O) and carbonate (δ13C) isotope variations, spanning the middle and late Miocene, which reveal statistically significant periodicities of approximately 2.0 and 1.25 Myr, 800, 400, 115 and 93 kyr and harmonics of the higher-order terms with remarkable resolution. Higher-order periodicities, hitherto unexplained in the spectrum of deep-sea records, match quite well with predicted large eccentricity cycles in the Earth's orbital variations17, indicating that eccentricity forcing (induced by orbital variations) exerts a major influence on the Earth's climate.
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References
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Tiwari, R. Higher-order eccentricity cycles of the middle and late Miocene climatic variations. Nature 327, 219–221 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1038/327219a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/327219a0
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