Stable carbon and oxygen isotope fractionation in bivalve (Placopecten magellanicus) larval aragonite
Abstract The relationship between stable isotope composition (δ13C and δ18O) in seawater and in larval shell aragonite of the sea scallop, Placopecten magellanicus, was investigated in a controlled experiment to determine whether isotopes in larval shell aragonite can be used as a reliable proxy for environmental conditions. The linear relationship between δ13CDIC and δ13Caragonite (r2 = 0.97, p δ 13 C DIC = 1.15 ( ± 0.05 ) ∗ δ 13 C aragonite - 0.85 ( ± 0.04 ) The relationship between δ13CDIC and δ13Caragonite described for P. magellanicus resulted in larval shell aragonite that was depleted on average by 1.82‰ (SD = 0.22‰, range = 1.1–2.1‰) from predicted equilibrium values based on the r…
The revolution of crossdating in marine palaeoecology and palaeoclimatology.
Over the past century, the dendrochronology technique of crossdating has been widely used to generate a global network of tree-ring chronologies that serves as a leading indicator of environmental variability and change. Only recently, however, has this same approach been applied to growth increments in calcified structures of bivalves, fish and corals in the world's oceans. As in trees, these crossdated marine chronologies are well replicated, annually resolved and absolutely dated, providing uninterrupted multi-decadal to millennial histories of ocean palaeoclimatic and palaeoecological processes. Moreover, they span an extensive geographical range, multiple trophic levels, habitats and f…
Gulf of Maine shells reveal changes in seawater temperature seasonality during the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age
article i nfo In this study, we use subannually resolved oxygen isotope values of fossil (dead-collected) and modern (live- caught) bivalve shells (Arctica islandica L.) from the northwestern Atlantic (Gulf of Maine, USA) to reconstruct past seasonal changes in seawater temperature. Our results indicate decreased seasonal temperature amplitude of about 1.6 °C (or ∼21%) during Medieval times (ca. AD 1033-1062) compared to shells from the early Little Ice Age (ca. AD 1321-1391) and during the late 19th century (AD 1864-1886). Additionally, seasonal oxygen isotope data suggest that summers were cooler and winters were warmer in the Gulf of Maine during the 11th century compared to summers and …
The effects of environment on Arctica islandica shell formation and architecture
Mollusks record valuable information in their hard parts that reflect ambient environmental conditions. For this reason, shells can serve as excellent archives to reconstruct past climate and environmental variability. However, animal physiology and biomineralization, which are often poorly un- derstood, can make the decoding of environmental signals a challenging task. Many of the routinely used shell-based proxies are sensitive to multiple different environmental and physiological variables. Therefore, the identification and in- terpretation of individual environmental signals (e.g., water temperature) often is particularly difficult. Additional prox- ies not influenced by multiple enviro…
Ba/Ca ratios in shells of Arctica islandica —Potential environmental proxy and crossdating tool
Abstract Ba/Ca shell time-series of marine bivalves typically show flat background levels which are interrupted by erratic sharp peaks. Evidence from the literature indicates that background Ba/Ca shell ratios broadly reflect salinity conditions. However, the causes for the Ba/Ca shell peaks are still controversial and widely debated although many researchers link these changes to primary productivity, freshwater input or spawning events. The most striking feature is that the Ba/Ca shell peaks are highly synchronous in contemporaneous specimens from the same population. For the first time, we studied Ba/Ca shell in mature and ontogenetically old (up to 251 year-old) specimens of the long-li…
Accurate increment identification and the spatial extent of the common signal in fiveArctica islandicachronologies from the Fladen Ground, northern North Sea
[1] The creation of networks of shell-based chronologies which can provide regionally extensive high-resolution proxies for the marine environment depends on the spatial extent of the common environmental signal preserved in the shell banding and on the reliability of the dating model. Here Arctica islandica chronologies from five neighboring sites in the North Sea are compared, and the strength of the common environmental signal across distances up to 80 km is analyzed using statistical techniques derived from dendrochronology. The signal is found to be coherent across these distances. In a linked study, chronologies based on one of the same sites but constructed by two different research …
Reproducibility of trace element time-series (Na/Ca, Mg/Ca, Mn/Ca, Sr/Ca, and Ba/Ca) within and between specimens of the bivalve Arctica islandica – A LA-ICP-MS line scan study
Abstract Trace element time-series in bivalve mollusk shells and other (biogenic) materials can potentially serve as environmental proxies. Yet, the applicability of element-to-calcium ratios is often challenging, because non-environmental factors such as vital effects distort or mask environmental signals. If a trace element time-series is driven by an environmental factor, it should be reproducible within and between coeval specimens of the same species. In the present study, we tested whether time-series of trace element-to-calcium ratios can be reproduced within and between coeval specimens of the bivalve Arctica islandica and thus whether an external signal is encoded in the temporal v…
Annually resolved δ13Cshell chronologies of long-lived bivalve mollusks (Arctica islandica) reveal oceanic carbon dynamics in the temperate North Atlantic during recent centuries
Abstract The ability of the ocean to absorb carbon dioxide is likely to be adversely affected by recent climate change. However, relatively little is known about the spatiotemporal variability in the oceanic carbon cycle due to the lack of long-term, high-resolution dissolved inorganic carbon isotope ( δ 13 C DIC ) data, especially for the temperate North Atlantic, which is the major oceanic sink for anthropogenic CO 2 . Here, we report shell carbon isotope values ( δ 13 C shell ), a potential proxy for δ 13 C DIC , of old-grown specimens of the long-lived bivalve mollusk, Arctica islandica . This paper presents the first absolutely dated, annually resolved δ 13 C shell record from surface …