Orbital-scale variability in the contribution of foraminifera and coccolithophores to pelagic carbonate production

Abstract

Throughout the Cenozoic, calcareous nannoplankton and planktonic foraminifera have been the main producers of pelagic carbonate preserved on the seafloor. While past variability in pelagic carbonate production has been previously studied, relatively little is known about the variability in the relative contribution of the two components. This is important because the responses of the two groups to environmental forcing could be different such that they could amplify or reduce the magnitude of fluctuations in total carbonate production. Here we present new data from the tropical Atlantic that allow us to quantify changes in the relative contribution of the two groups to the total pelagic carbonate burial flux on orbital scales and between different climate states since the Miocene. We find that the composition of the deposited pelagic carbonate remained similar on long time scales, with foraminifera making up about 30 % of the deposited carbonate, but varied by up to a factor of two on orbital time scales. We show that the relative contribution of planktonic foraminifera and coccoliths did not correlate with the total pelagic carbonate production, either in the Pliocene, when its dominant cyclicity was in the precession band and in phase with orbital parameters modulations, or in the Miocene, when its predominant cyclicity was in the eccentricity band and in antiphase with orbital parameters modulations. The observed variability in tropical pelagic carbonate productivity between foraminifera and coccolithophores suggests that the two main groups of pelagic calcifiers responded fundamentally differently to orbital forcing and associated oceanographic changes in the tropical ocean, but the resulting changes in their proportions did not drive changes in overall pelagic carbonate deposition on either geological or orbital time scales.