Sea surface temperatures from the Western Pacific Warm Pool across the last 17kyrs

Changes in the extent and position of the IPWP likely impacted the tropical and global climate in the past. To put recent ocean changes into a longer temporal context, we present new paleoceanographic sea surface temperature reconstructions from off Papua New Guinea (RR1313-23PC: 4.4939°S, 145.6703°E, 712 m water depth) which is at the heart of the Western Pacific Warm Pool (WPWP), which is the warmest region within the IPWP, across the last 17,000 years.

A new surface temperature dataset from the northeast South China Sea is also presented (ODP1144: 20.053°N, 117.4189°E; water depth 2037 m). In both locations we use Mg/Ca measurements on G.ruber s.s. (white) to calculate sea surface temperatures.