• journal_title：Geology
• Contributor：Aurora C. Elmore ; James D. Wright
• Publisher：Geological Society of America
• Date：2011-
• Format：text/html
• Language：en
• Identifier：10.1130/G31376.1
• journal_abbrev：Geology
• issn：0091-7613
• volume：39
• issue：2
• firstpage：107
• section：Articles

The Younger Dryas, the last large millennial-scale climate oscillation (12.9–11.6 ka), has been widely attributed to a massive meltwater discharge event that disrupted ocean circulation and plunged the circum–North Atlantic back into a near-glacial state. Low-resolution deep-water reconstructions indicate lower North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) production during the Younger Dryas, though the Δ¹⁴C record requires some deep-water production. Herein, we reconstruct deep-water mass variations using a southern Gardar Drift sediment core with an expanded Younger Dryas section. We show that southern-sourced water invaded the deep North Atlantic to start the Younger Dryas, but was replaced by NADW within 500 yr. Southern-sourced waters briefly reappeared at the end of the Younger Dryas. These deep-water reorganizations to start and end the Younger Dryas suggest that increased meltwater fluxes were limited temporally and focused on regions where deep-water convection occurred during the deglaciation.