Linkages between East China Sea Deep-sea Oxygenation and Variability in
the East Asian Summer Monsoon and Kuroshio Current over the last 400,000
years
Abstract
The East China Sea (ECS) seasonally receives a high organic input due to
the terrestrial organic matter influx, which is controlled by the East
Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM), and the increased productivity driven by
upwelling of the subsurface Kuroshio Current (KC). Changes in benthic
foraminiferal assemblage composition in combination with
paleoceanographic proxy data (CaCO3 (%), TOC (%), δ13Cpf, and δ18Obf)
are used to reconstruct bottom water oxygenation and organic export flux
variability over the last 400 kyr in the ECS. Multivariate analyses of
benthic foraminiferal census data identified six biofacies
characteristic of varying environmental conditions. These results
suggest that enhanced EASM precipitation and KC upwelling directly
influenced organic export flux and bottom water oxygen content in the
ECS. The ECS bottom water was suboxic during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS)
11 to 8; suboxic to dysoxic between MIS 7 and 6, strongly dysoxic
between mid-MIS 5 and 4, and exhibited high variability between MIS 3
and 1. Spectral analysis of relative abundances of representative genera
Quinqueloculina (oxic), Bulimina (suboxic), and Globobulimina (dysoxic)
reveals a robust 23 kyr signal, which we attribute to
precessionally-paced changes in surface productivity and bottom water
oxygenation related to EASM and KC variability over the past 400 kyr.