Five million years of Antarctic Circumpolar Current strength variability.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) represents the world's largest ocean-current system and affects global ocean circulation, climate and Antarctic ice-sheet stability. Today, ACC dynamics are controlled by atmospheric forcing, oceanic density gradients and eddy activity. Whereas palaeoceanographic reconstructions exhibit regional heterogeneity in ACC position and strength over Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles, the long-term evolution of the ACC is poorly known.

Paleoenvironmental changes in the coastal zone of the northwest South China Sea during the last 13 kyr.

Marine sediments in coastal zones serve as valuable archives for understanding the history of silicate chemical weathering and summer monsoon rainfall in source areas, providing insights into terrigenous climate and environmental evolution. In this study, we investigated the grain size, clay minerals, and geochemistry of sediments retrieved from core KZK01 in the coastal zone of the northwest South China Sea during the past 13 thousand years before present (kyr BP). Our findings demonstrated that the illite crystallinity index served as a reliable proxy for assessing the intensity of chemical weathering in the source area.

Orbital- and millennial-scale Antarctic Circumpolar Current variability in Drake Passage over the past 140,000 years.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) plays a crucial role in global ocean circulation by fostering deep-water upwelling and formation of new water masses. On geological time-scales, ACC variations are poorly constrained beyond the last glacial. Here, we reconstruct changes in ACC strength in the central Drake Passage in vicinity of the modern Polar Front over a complete glacial-interglacial cycle (i.