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Articles |
School of Geography & Geoscience, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL (e-mail: agc10{at}st-andrews.ac.uk)
Pronounced seasonal heating of middle and high latitude shelf seas results in large temporal changes in seawater temperature that have the potential to be recorded by benthic foraminifera. Predicted oxygen isotope composition for calcite precipitating in equilibrium conditions with seawater suggest that pronounced ‘seasonal isotope effects’ may be encountered in the growth history of benthic foraminifera. Such ‘seasonal’ effects can be difficult to distinguish from so-called ‘vital effects’, where shell and equilibrium calcite values are offset by a constant difference in oxygen isotope values. Preliminary findings suggest that benthic foraminifera may have more than one phase of growth, for example Ammonia becarii calcifies in spring and late summer, potentially introducing apparent intra-annual and inter-annual temperature variations of >1°C into palaeoclimatic reconstructions when mixed-season populations are sampled. We highlight the need to select species-specific palaeotemperature equations to establish reliable isotopic disequilibria and illustrate the importance of understanding the ‘seasonal isotope effect’ when considering disequilibrium effects in foraminifera which have grown in seasonally-changing environments.
