A database of surface Antarctic snow isotopic composition is constructed using available measurements, with an estimate of data quality and local variability. Although more than 1000 locations are documented, the spatial coverage remains uneven with a majority of sites located in specific areas of East Antarctica. The database is used to analyze the spatial variations in snow isotopic composition with respect to geographical characteristics (elevation, distance to the coast) and climatic features (temperature, accumulation) and with a focus on deuterium excess. The capacity of theoretical isotopic, regional, and general circulation atmospheric models (including "isotopic" models) to reproduce the observed features and assess the role of moisture advection in spatial deuterium excess fluctuations is analyzed.

The Milankovitch theory of climate change proposes that glacial-interglacial cycles are driven by changes in summer insolation at high northern latitudes. The timing of climate change in the Southern Hemisphere at glacial-interglacial transitions (which are known as terminations) relative to variations in summer insolation in the Northern Hemisphere is an important test of this hypothesis. So far, it has only been possible to apply this test to the most recent termination, because the dating uncertainty associated with older terminations is too large to allow phase relationships to be determined. Here we present a new chronology of Antarctic climate change over the past 360,000 years that is based on the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen molecules in air trapped in the Dome Fuji and Vostok ice cores. This ratio is a proxy for local summer insolation, and thus allows the chronology to be constructed by orbital tuning without the need to assume a lag between a climate record and an orbital parameter. The accuracy of the chronology allows us to examine the phase relationships between climate records from the ice cores and changes in insolation. Our results indicate that orbital-scale Antarctic climate change lags Northern Hemisphere insolation by a few millennia, and that the increases in Antarctic temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration during the last four terminations occurred within the rising phase of Northern Hemisphere summer insolation. These results support the Milankovitch theory that Northern Hemisphere summer insolation triggered the last four deglaciations.

[1] Stable isotopes of water are important climatic tracers used to understand atmospheric moisture cycling and to reconstruct paleoclimate. The combined use of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes in water provides an additional parameter, deuterium excess (d), which might reflect ocean surface conditions in moisture source regions for precipitation. The d records from polar ice cores covering glacial-interglacial cycles were used to reconstruct ocean surface temperatures at the moisture source, enabling elimination of source effects from the conventional isotope thermometer. However, observations of the essential relationship between d in vapor and ocean surface conditions are very limited. To date, theoretical values predicted using simple and atmospheric general circulation models (GCM) have not been validated against the data. Here, we show the isotope ratios of atmospheric water vapor near the ocean surface in middle and high latitudes of the Southern Ocean. Our observations show that d negatively correlates with relative humidity (h) above the ocean and correlates with sea surface temperature (SST). Despite the fact that the GCMs would underestimate the absolute value of observed d, the observations and simulation results are consistent for slopes between d versus h and d versus SST, suggesting that d is a reliable index to h and SST over the ocean surface.