Cyclochronology of the Eocene-Oligocene transition from the Cape Roberts Project-3 core, Victoria Land basin, Antarctica

About 34 million years ago, at the Eocene-Oligocene (E-O) transition, Earth's climate underwent a substantial change from relatively ice-free "green house" conditions to a glacial state marked by the establishment of a permanent ice sheet on Antarctica. Our understanding of the Antarctic cryospheric evolution across the E-O climate transition relies on indirect marine geochemical proxies and, hitherto, it has not been possible to reconcile the pattern of inferred ice-sheet growth from these "far-field" proxy records with direct physical evidence of ice sheet behaviour from the proximal Antarctic continental margin. Here we present a correlation of cyclical changes recorded in the CRP-3 drill hole sediment core from the western Ross Sea, that are related to oscillations in the volume of a growing East Antarctic Ice Sheet, with well dated lower latitude records of orbital forcing and climate change across the E-O transition. We evaluate the results in the light of the age model available for the CRP-3A succession. Our cyclostratigraphy developed on the basis of repetitive vertical facies changes and clast peak abundances within sequences matches the floating cyclochronology developed in deep-sea successions for major glacial events. The astrochronological calibration of the CRP-3 succession represents the first high-resolution correlation of direct physical evidence of orbitally controlled glaciation from the Antarctic margin to geochemical records of paleoclimate changes across the E-O climate transition. (c) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.