ASYNC – Resolving asynchronous responses of North Atlantic climate to deglacial changes in ocean circulation

Resolving and quantifying asynchronous changes within the coupled ocean-atmosphere system is essential to improve the theoretical understanding of climate processes and predictive capacity of climate models, as well as identifying under which conditions abrupt climate change occurs.

ASYNC is an international collaborative project led by the University of Cambridge that will tackle this fundamental problem. The project will avail of unique North Atlantic Ocean sediment records to generate a suite of precisely dated and multidecadally-resolved proxy records of ocean circulation and climate change. ASYNC represents the first targeted effort to compare high resolution North Atlantic proxy records by precisely integrating the underlying timescales in a continuous fashion. The marine records will be synchronised to the Greenland ice-core chronology via independent and continuous reconstructions of globally synchronous variations in the incoming cosmic ray flux using multidecadally-resolved cosmogenic 10Be records from seafloor sediments and published ice cores.