Sea surface temperature reconstruction in the Pacific Ocean using multi-elemental proxy in Porites and Diploastrea corals: Application to Palau Archipelago
Massive reef-building Porites corals are commonly studied to obtain long-term reconstructions of past sea surface temperature (SST) using temperature-sensitive elemental proxies, such as Sr/Ca or Li/Mg ratios. Most recently, a multi-proxy approach combining these two ratios (e.g. D’Olivo et al., 2018) and the Sr
U method (DeCarlo et al., 2016) have proved to be more robust to reconstruct paleo-temperatures. To date, no study has been carried out on the application of these new approaches on the Diploastrea heliopora coral, another massive reef-building genus that can potentially provide longer temperature records. Moreover, only a few studies have assessed coral SST calibrations at the scale of the Indo-Pacific basin and compared SST reconstructions obtained from two massive coral genera from the same site.
In this study, we investigated the elemental composition of the topmost portion of 34 modern tropical Porites and 6 Diploastrea colonies collected during the Tara Pacific expedition (2016–2018) from various hydrological contexts in the Pacific Ocean. We derived and discussed annual Sr/Ca, Li/Mg, combined Sr/Ca-Li/Mg and Sr/Ca-Li/Ca-Mg/Ca and SrU vs. SST calibrations as well as potential intra-colonial and genus specific effects and evaluated the use of these basin-wide calibration equations. Overall, multi-ratio and multi-genera SST calibrations perform better than single-ratio calibrations and seem to improve temperature reconstructions.
These new SST calibrations were applied to two colonies of Porites and Diploastrea collected from the same site in the North-West of the Palau archipelago located in the western Pacific Ocean to evaluate the applicability of universal calibrations based on different proxies and their combination. Coral-based SST records spanning the last 141 years show decadal changes and recent warming episodes that are related to major El Niño Southern Oscillation events. However, differences in reconstruction remain between both genera in the long-term trends, amplitudes, and absolute temperatures, depending on which genus or temperature proxy is considered.