Millennial‐Scale Climate Oscillations Triggered by Deglacial Meltwater Discharge in Last Glacial Maximum Simulations.

Our limited understanding of millennial‐scale variability in the context of the last glacial period can be explained by the lack of a reliable modeling framework to study abrupt climate changes under realistic glacial backgrounds. In this article, we describe a new set of long‐run Last Glacial Maximum experiments where such climate shifts were triggered by different snapshots of ice‐sheet meltwater derived from the early stages of the last deglaciation. Depending on the location and the magnitude of the forcing, we observe three distinct dynamical regimes and highlight a subtle window of opportunity where the climate can sustain oscillations between cold and warm modes. We identify the Eurasian Arctic and Nordic Seas regions as being most sensitive to meltwater discharge in the context of switching to a cold mode, compared to freshwater fluxes from the Laurentide ice sheets. These cold climates follow a consistent pattern in temperature, sea ice, and convection, and are largely independent from freshwater release as a result of effective AMOC collapse. Warm modes, on the other hand, show more complexity in their response to the regional pattern of the meltwater input, and within them, we observe significant differences linked to the reorganization of deep water formation sites and the subpolar gyre. Broadly, the main characteristics of the oscillations, obtained under full‐glacial conditions with ice‐sheet reconstruction derived meltwater patterns, share similar characteristics with δ18O records of the last glacial period, although our experiment design prevents detailed conclusions from being drawn on whether these represent actual Dansgaard‐Oeschger events. Plain Language Summary: During the last glacial period (115,000–12,000 years before present), the baseline cold climate was continuously disturbed by intense and abrupt climate changes. They completely modified the climate for a few thousand years or so, resulting, for instance, in massive temperature shifts and complete reorganizations of ocean circulation. These abrupt changes have been observed in climate records from the Northern Hemisphere and also can be traced in records from the Southern Hemisphere. Yet, we still do not know what triggers these changes, and often cannot simulate them at the right time under known environmental conditions. In the context of the Last Glacial Maximum, a cold period 21,000 years ago with extensive ice over the Northern Hemisphere, this article analyses a new set of climate model simulations that test the effects of freshwater melting from the ice sheets at different periods of the early deglaciation (∼21,000 to 18,000 years before present). Under some conditions, the resulting experiments displayed an Atlantic Ocean that oscillates between strong and collapsed basin‐wide circulation, causing approximately 10°C of temperature change over Greenland; a behavior that resembles observed abrupt climate changes. Key Points: New set of long‐run Last Glacial Maximum general circulation model experiments showing millennial‐scale variabilityDetailed description of the impact of ice sheet reconstruction‐derived meltwater distributions on abrupt climate changesIntroduction for future studies of the underlying physical processes of abrupt climate changes [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]