Data Report: Diatom Records of ODP Site 1143 in the Southern South China Sea

Paleoceanography of the mid-Pleistocene South China Sea

“…8) and in the very low-resolution record of Site 1143 (Lu et al, 2004). Since MIS 21, diatom abundance increased during interglacials and remained low during most glacials.…”

Production of short-chain n-fatty acids in coral reefs in the southern South China Sea since the Late Miocene

“…0.6 Ma (Figs. 5D-F; Yang et al, 2002;Lu et al, 2003;Zhang et al, 2009), much later than inferred from records of n-C 14-18 FAs and Ln(Ba/Ti) in Well NK1 (Figs. 5A-B; this study) and opal in ODP Site 1143 (Fig.…”

“…The n-C 14-18 FA, Ln(Ba/Ti) and opal curves are smoothed by 3-point running average. Also shown are the depth profiles of diatoms (E) (Lu et al, 2003) and radiolarians (F) (Chen et al, 2003) with ages labeled in the curves based on age models in Wang et al (2004). in Well NK1 (this study) with the global compilation of sea-level variations (D) (Miller et al, 2020), BIT records (E) (with lower values indicating higher sea levels) in Well XK1 in the northern SCS (Shao et al, 2017a) and global deep-sea  18 O records (F) (Westerhold et al, 2020).…”

“…Previous studies have revealed that surface phytoplankton production is critically limited by nutrient availability in surface waters in the oligotrophic oceans (Falkowski et al, 1998), including the southern SCS (Liu et al, 2002;Ning et al, 2004;Tang et al, 2004Tang et al, , 2006. The summertime upwelling-induced nutrients were proposed as the main nutrient resources delivered to offshore waters in the southern SCS, leading to higher nutrient loading in response to intensified summer monsoon in the early Late Miocene (i.e., 10-7 Ma; Chen et al, 2003;Lu et al, 2003;Wan et al, 2006). However, the proposed summer monsoon intensification is not compatible with many other proxy records from the monsoon-domain that indicate a major weakening of summer monsoon in the early Late Miocene (Guo et al, 2002;Jia et al, 2003;Sun and Wang, 2005;Clift et al, 2014;Gupta et al, 2015;Clift and Webb, 2019).…”

“…This is further supported by many other independent production records in adjacent ODP Site 1143, showing largely similar decreased trends in surface production since the Late Miocene on million-year timescales (Figs. 5C-F), such as opal (Li et al, 2002;Wang et al, 2004;Wan et al, 2006), Ba/Ti (Zhang et al, 2009), diatom (Lu et al, 2003) and radiolarian (Chen et al, 2003).…”