ORCID

0000-0001-6362-7845 (Schmidt)

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1038/s41467-025-60773-7

Publication Title

Nature Communications

Volume

16

Issue

1

Pages

5567 (1-8)

Abstract

We present high-resolution records of detrital Pb and Nd isotopes from marine core site MV1014-02-17JC (00° 10.8297’S, 85° 52.0042’W) in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific (EEP) and use a Bayesian isotope mixing model, MixSIAR, to quantify global dust source contributions since the onset of the last glaciation 30,000 yr ago. We find that in addition to South American dust from the Andean margin, North African dust from the Saharan desert makes up significant proportions of the EEP dust delivered to the site of study. The proportion of North African dust was significantly enhanced during the cold Northern Hemisphere stadials, Heinrich Stadial 1 and the Younger Dryas, when dust fluxes were also higher. During the warm Bølling-Allerød and African Humid Periods, dust fluxes were decreased, and the proportion of South American dust was enhanced. We suggest the variability in the proportions of northern vs. southern hemisphere sourced dust in the EEP is indicative of large climate-related meridional shifts (>7°) in the average position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a major precipitation belt which, today, affects the lives of billions across our planet.

Rights

© 2025 The Authors.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

Article states: "Source data are provided in the “Source Data File” in the supplementary material."

Original Publication Citation

Schimmenti, D. E., Marcantonio, F., Roxana Sierra-Hernández, M., & Schmidt, M. W. (2025). Millennial pulses of African dust and ITCZ shifts in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific. Nature Communications, 16(1), 1-8, Article 5567. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-60773-7

Additional Files
41467_2025_60773_MOESM1_ESM.pdf (840 kB)
Supplementary Information
41467_2025_60773_MOESM2_ESM.pdf (122 kB)
Description of Additional Supplementary Files
41467_2025_60773_MOESM3_ESM (1).xlsx (129 kB)
Supplementary Data 1-8
41467_2025_60773_MOESM4_ESM.pdf (621 kB)
Transparent Peer Review file
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