Commentary on “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago”

Bill Ruddiman (Climatic Change, 61, 261–293, 2003) recently suggested that early civilisations could have saved us from an ice age because land management over substantial areas caused an increase in atmospheric CO₂ concentration. Ruddiman suggests a decreasing “natural course” of the Holocene greenhouse gases concentrations and sea-level by referring to analogous situations in the past, namely the last three interglacials. An examination of marine isotopic stage 11 would perhaps make Ruddiman’s argument even more thought-challenging. Yet, the hypothesis of a natural lowering of CO₂ during the Holocene contradicts recent numerical simulations of the Earth carbon cycle during this period. We think that the only way to resolve this conflict is to properly assimilate the palæoclimate information in numerical climate models. As a general rule, models are insufficiently tested with respect to the wide range of climate situations that succeeded during the Pleistocene. In this comment, we present three definitions of palæoclimate information assimilation with relevant examples. We also present original results with the Louvain-la-Neuve climate-ice sheet model suggesting that if, indeed, the Holocene atmospheric CO₂ increase is anthropogenic, a late Holocene glacial inception is plausible, but not certain, depending on the exact time evolution of the atmospheric CO₂ concentration during this period.     

Determination of the Tin Stable Isotopic Composition in Tin‐bearing Metals and Minerals by MC‐ICP‐MS

This study uses MC‐ICP‐MS for the precise analysis of the stable tin isotopic composition in ore minerals of tin (cassiterite, stannite), tin metal and tin bronze. The ultimate goal is to determine the provenance of tin in ancient metal objects. We document the isotope compositions of reference materials and compare the precision of different isotope ratios and the accuracy of different procedures of mass fractionation correction. These data represent a base with which isotopic data of future studies can be directly compared. The isotopic composition of cassiterite and stannite can be determined after reduction to tin metal and bronze, respectively. Both metals readily dissolve in HCl, but while the solutions of tin metal can be directly measured, the bronze solutions must be purified with an anion exchanger. The correction of the mass bias is best performed with an internal Sb standard and an empirical regression method. A series of Sn isotope determinations on commercially available mono‐element Sn solutions as well as reference bronze materials and tin minerals show fractionations ranging from about ?0.09‰ to 0.05‰/amu. The combined analytical uncertainty (2s) was determined by replicate dissolutions of reference materials of bronze (BAM 211, IARM‐91D) and averages at about 0.005‰/amu.     

The origin of banding in the Main Donegal Granite,N.W. Ireland

This Caledonian pluton exhibits a regular, sub-vertical banding in which layers of dark, relatively fine grained trondhjemite alternate with layers of light, coarse grained granite. The textures and the presence of cross-cutting bands of granite indicate that the light bands were derived by potash feldspathization of the trondhjemite. The geometry of the banding indicates that it formed during the “synplutonic” deformation of the pluton, largely in situ. The bands formed by segregation of alkalies into dilatant zones of movement produced during the deformation of partly consolidated magma.