Spatiotemporal changes in riverine input into the Eocene North Sea revealed by strontium isotope and barium analysis of bivalve shells

Abstract

Reconstructing hydrological conditions of past warm periods, such as the Eocene ‘hot house’ provides empirical data to compare to state of the art climate models. However, reconstructing these changes in deep time is challenging, for example, given the complex interplay between evapotranspiration, precipitation and runoff. As a proxy for past changes in these hydrological systems, the dynamics of fresh water input into marginal seas can be used to identify the spatiotemporal distribution of riverine runoff. Elemental barium (Ba) and radiogenic strontium (87Sr) are, depending on the amount of runoff and the background geology of the catchment area, typically enriched in river waters in comparison to seawater and can thus be utilized to determine changes in riverine fresh water discharge. Here, we use barium to calcium ratios (Ba/Ca) and radiogenic strontium isotopes (87Sr/86Sr) measured in fossil bivalve shells to reconstruct patterns of fresh water input into the paleo North Sea during the early to middle Eocene. Our reconstruction shows the potential of Ba/Ca and 87Sr/86Sr to serve as proxies for riverine runoff and highlights the spatiotemporal complexity of Eocene hydrological conditions in western Europe. In particular, our results enable changes in riverine input along geological to perennial time scales for different coastal regions to be determined, revealing a steady influx of fresh water, but with distinct spatiotemporal differences.