Tessa R. Vance

University of Tasmania · Institute for Marine & Antarctic Science

During the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT), ca. 1200–800 000 years ago (ka), the Earth's glacial cycles changed from 41 to 100 kyr periodicity. The emergence of this longer ice age periodicity was accompanied by higher global ice volume in glacial periods and lower global ice volume in interglacial periods. Since there is no known change in extern...

Ice cores contain stratified layers of impurities scavenged from the atmosphere, which are a vital tool for investigating the Earth system. Reconstructing past eruption records by way of ice core tephrochronology can help us understand ash dispersal, atmospheric circulation processes, and the impacts of volcanic eruptions on climate. This study pre...

The Mount Brown South ice core (MBS 69.111° S 86.312° E) is a new, high resolution ice core drilled in coastal East Antarctica. With mean annual accumulation estimated to be 20–30 cm ice equivalent accumulation throughout the length of the core (∼295 m), MBS represents a high resolution archive of ice core data spanning 1137 years (873–2009 CE), fr...

The Mount Brown South (MBS) ice core in East Antarctica (69° S, 86° E) has produced records of sea salt concentration and snow accumulation for examining past climate. In a previous study, the sea salt concentration, but not snow accumulation, showed a significant, positive relationship with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) from June to Nove...

We report high resolution measurements of the stable water isotope ratios (δ¹⁸O, δD) from the Mount Brown South ice core (MBS, 69.11° S 86.31° E). The record covers the period 873 - 2009 CE with sub-annual temporal resolution. Preliminary analyses of surface cores have shown the Mount Brown South site has relatively high annual snowfall accumulatio...

Antarctic atmospheric rivers (ARs) are rare but high-impact events that have a major influence on the surface mass and energy balance of the ice sheet, by causing strong positive anomalies in temperature and precipitation. Previous studies have shown that the main moisture sources of Antarctic ARs extend from the midlatitudes to the subtropics (equ...

Australia’s record-breaking 2019/20 Black Summer fire weather resulted from a combination of natural and anthropogenic climate factors, but the full range of natural variability in fire weather is unknown. We reconstruct southeast Australian fire weather over the Common Era based on an East Antarctic ice core sea-salt aerosol record. This record re...

Weather systems in the southern Indian Ocean influence East Antarctic precipitation variability and surface mass balance. However, long term variability in synoptic-scale weather systems in this region is not well understood due to short instrumental records that are mostly limited to the satellite era (post 1979). Ice core records from coastal Eas...

Climate reconstructions of the last millennium rely on networks of high-resolution and well-dated proxy records. This study presents age-at-depth data and preliminary results from the new Mount Brown South (MBS) ice cores, collected at an elevation of 2084 m on the boundary of Princess Elizabeth Land and Kaiser Wilhelm II Land in East Antarctica. W...

During atmospheric river (AR) landfalls on the Antarctic ice sheet, the high waviness of the circumpolar polar jet stream allows for subtropical air masses to be advected toward the Antarctic coastline. These rare but high‐impact AR events are highly consequential for the Antarctic mass balance; yet little is known about the various atmospheric dyn...

Between March 15-19, 2022, East Antarctica experienced an exceptional heatwave with widespread 30-40° C temperature anomalies across the ice sheet. In Part I, we assessed the meteorological drivers that generated an intense atmospheric river (AR) which caused these record-shattering temperature anomalies. Here in Part II, we continue our large, col...

Between March 15-19, 2022, East Antarctica experienced an exceptional heatwave with widespread 30-40° C temperature anomalies across the ice sheet. This record-shattering event saw numerous monthly temperature records being broken including a new all-time temperature record of -9.4° C on March 18 at Concordia Station despite March typically being a...

Physical features preserved in ice cores may provide unique records about past atmospheric variability. Linking the formation and preservation of these features and the atmospheric processes causing them is key to their interpretation as palaeoclimate proxies. We imaged ice cores from Law Dome, East Antarctica, using an intermediate layer core scan...

During atmospheric river (AR) landfalls on the Antarctic ice sheet, the high waviness of the circumpolar polar jet stream allows for sub-tropical air masses to be advected towards the Antarctic coastline. These rare but high-impact AR events are highly consequential for the Antarctic mass balance; yet little is known about the various atmospheric d...

Water stable isotope records from ice cores (δ18O and δD) are a critical tool for constraining long-term temperature variability at high latitudes. However, precipitation in Antarctica consists of semi-continuous small events and intermittent extreme events. In regions of high accumulation, this can bias ice core records towards recording the synop...

Climate reconstructions of the last millennium rely on networks of high resolution and well-dated proxy records. This study presents age-at-depth data and preliminary results from the new Mount Brown South ice cores, collected at an elevation of 2,084 metres on the boundary of Princess Elizabeth and Kaiser Wilhelm II Land in East Antarctica. We sho...

Changes in sea ice conditions and atmospheric circulation over the Southern Ocean play an important role in modulating Antarctic climate. However, observations of both sea ice and wind conditions are limited in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, both temporally and spatially, prior to the satellite era (1970 onwards). Ice core chemistry data can be...

The Southern Annular Mode (SAM) is the leading mode of atmospheric variability in the extratropical Southern Hemisphere and has wide ranging effects on ecosystems and societies. Despite the SAM’s importance, paleoclimate reconstructions disagree on its variability and trends over the Common Era, which may be linked to variability in SAM teleconnect...

Physical features preserved in ice cores may provide unique records about past atmospheric variability. Linking the formation and preservation of these features and the atmospheric processes causing them is key to their interpretation as paleoclimate proxies. We imaged ice cores from Law Dome, East Antarctica using an Intermediate Layer Ice Core Sc...

Changes in sea ice conditions and atmospheric circulation over the Southern Ocean play an important role in modulating Antarctic climate. However, observations of both sea ice and wind conditions are limited in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, both temporally and spatially. Ice core chemistry data can be used to reconstruct changes over annual, d...

Water stable isotope records from ice cores (δ18O and δD) are a critical tool for constraining long-term temperature variability in the high-latitudes. However, precipitation in Antarctica consists of semi-continuous small events and intermittent extreme events. In regions of high-accumulation, this can bias ice core records towards recording the s...

The Southern Annular Mode (SAM) is the leading mode of atmospheric variability in the extratropical Southern Hemisphere and has wide ranging effects on ecosystems and societies. Despite the SAM’s importance, paleoclimate reconstructions disagree on its variability and trends. Here, we use data assimilation to reconstruct the SAM over the last 2000...

Previous research has shown that aerosol sea salt concentrations (Southern Ocean wind proxy) preserved in the Law Dome ice core (East Antarctica) correlate significantly with subtropical eastern Australian rainfall. However, physical mechanisms underpinning this connection have not been established. Here we use synoptic typing to show that an atmos...

Ice core records from Law Dome in East Antarctica collected over the last four decades provide high-resolution data for studies of the climate of Antarctica, Australia, and the Southern and Indo-Pacific oceans. Here, we present a set of annually dated records of trace chemistry, stable water isotopes and snow accumulation from Law Dome covering the...

During the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT), ca. 1250–800 kya, the Earth’s glacial cycles changed from 41 ky to 100 ky periodicity. The emergence of this longer ice-age periodicity was accompanied by higher global ice volume in glacial periods and lower global ice volume in interglacial periods. Since there is no known change in external orbital fo...

The Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, an index which defines decadal climate variability throughout the Pacific, is generally assumed to have positive and negative phases that each last 20-30 years. Here we present a 2000-year reconstruction of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, obtained using information preserved in Antarctic ice cores, that s...

Ice core records from Law Dome in East Antarctica, collected over the the last three decades, provide high resolution data for studies of the climate of Antarctica, Australia and the Southern and Indo-Pacific Oceans. Here we present a set of annually dated records of trace chemistry, stable water isotopes and snow accumulation from Law Dome coverin...

Here, we define weather regimes in the East Antarctica—Southern Ocean sector based on daily anomalies of 700 hPa geopotential height derived from ERA5 reanalysis during 1979–2018. Most regimes and their preferred transitions depict synoptic‐scale disturbances propagating eastwards off the Antarctic coastline. While regime sequences are generally sh...

Paleoclimate archives, such as high-resolution ice core records, provide a means to investigate past climate variability. Until recently, the Law Dome (Dome Summit South site) ice core record remained one of few millennial-length high-resolution coastal records in East Antarctica. A new ice core drilled in 2017/2018 at Mount Brown South, approximat...

Knowledge of past, current, and future hydroclimatic risk is of great importance. However, like many other countries, Australia's observed hydroclimate records are at best only ∼ 120 years long (i.e. from ∼ 1900 to the present) but are typically less than ∼ 50 years long. Therefore, recent research has focused on developing longer hydroclimate reco...

Paleoclimate archives, such as high-resolution ice core records, provide a means to investigate long-term (multi-centennial) climate variability. Until recently, the Law Dome (Dome Summit South) ice core record remained one of few long-term high-resolution records in East Antarctica. A new ice core drilled in 2017/2018 at Mount Brown South, approxi...

Weather systems in the southern Indian Ocean (SIO) drive synoptic-scale precipitation variability in East Antarctica and southern Australia. Improved understanding of these dynamical linkages is beneficial to diagnose long-term climate changes from climate proxy records as well as informing regional weather and climate forecasts. Self-organising ma...

Study Region The Lockyer Catchment, Queensland, Australia. Study Focus Future rainfall projections are usually presented as a percentage change from current climate, where current climate is defined using relatively short instrumental records. However, palaeoclimate reconstructions demonstrate that instrumental data does not capture the full range...

Interpretation of eastern Antarctic ice-core palaeoclimate proxies can be improved through better understanding of the synoptic-scale dynamics and variability of the Southern Indian Ocean. In the case of high-resolution (seasonal to annual) ice-cores, this is especially important, as event-scale precipitation and redistribution of surface snow can...

Knowledge of past, current and future hydroclimatic risk is of great importance. However, like many other countries, Australia's observed hydroclimate records are at best only ~ 120 years long (i.e. from ~ 1900 to present) but are typically less than ~ 50 years long. Therefore, recent research has focused on developing longer hydroclimate records b...

Study region South East Queensland (SEQ), Australia. Study focus Decision makers in the water sector need to deal with uncertainty about the impacts of climate variability and change. Identifying solutions for hydroclimatic risk adaptation strategies that are both optimal and robust in the presence of this uncertainty presents a difficult challeng...

In the version of this Perspective originally published, affiliations 1 and 4 ware incorrect, and should have read: “¹Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems CRC, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia” and “⁴Centre for Water, Climate and Land (CWCL), University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia”. These have been corrected in the online v...

The interaction of gradual climate trends and extreme weather events since the turn of the century has triggered complex and, in some cases, catastrophic ecological responses around the world. We illustrate this using Australian examples within a press-pulse framework. Despite the Australian biota being adapted to high natural climate variability,...

The leading mode of atmospheric variability in the Southern Hemisphere is the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), which affects the atmosphere and ocean from the mid-latitudes to the Antarctic. However, the short instrumental record of the SAM does not adequately represent its multi-decadal to centennial-scale variability. Long palaeoclimatic reconstructi...

Here we present a revised Law Dome, Dome Summit South (DSS) ice core age model (denoted LD2017) that significantly improves the chronology over the last 88 ka. An ensemble approach was used, allowing for the computation of both a median age and associated uncertainty as a function of depth. The revised chronology incorporates extended continuous an...

The study of (Palmer et al 2015 Environ. Res. Lett. 10 124002) details a spatial reconstruction of drought across eastern Australia and New Zealand over the last 500 years. The authors used a global 0.5° by 0.5° gridded network of the self-calibrating Palmer drought severity index (scPDSI) spanning 1901-2012 as the basis for a nested point-by-point...

The Law Dome site is ideal for the evaluation of sea ice proxies due to its location near to the Antarctic coast, regular and high accumulation throughout the year, an absence of surface melting or remobilization, and minimal multiyear sea ice. We present records of bromine and iodine concentrations and their enrichment beyond seawater compositions...

A primary goal of the SCAR (Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research) initiated AntClim21 (Antarctic Climate in the 21st Century) Scientific Research Programme is to develop analogs for understanding past, present and future climates for the Antarctic and Southern Hemisphere. In this contribution to AntClim21 we provide a framework for achieving...

Estimation of correlation with appropriate uncertainty limits for scientific data that are potentially serially correlated is a common problem made seriously challenging especially when data are sampled unevenly in space and/or time. Here we present a new, robust method for estimating correlation with uncertainty limits between autocorrelated serie...

Understanding the causes of recent climatic trends and variability in the high-latitude Southern Hemisphere is hampered by a short instrumental record. Here, we analyse recent atmosphere, surface ocean and sea-ice observations in this region and assess their trends in the context of palaeoclimate records and climate model simulations. Over the 36-y...

Comparison of meteorological records and ice core snowfall data from Law Dome, Antarctica, have previously revealed a teleconnection with drought in southwest Western Australia (van Ommen and Morgan, 2010). Here we extend the comparison period using more recent ice core data (Roberts et al., 2015) that provides a significantly longer overlap with m...

The Law Dome site is ideal for the evaluation of sea ice proxies due to its location near to the Antarctic coast, regular and high accumulation throughout the year, an absence of surface melting or remobilization, and minimal multiyear sea ice. We present records of bromine and iodine concentrations and their enrichment beyond seawater compositions...

Paleoclimate research indicates that the Australian instrumental climate record (∼ 100 years) does not cover the full range of hydroclimatic variability that is possible. To better understand the implications of this on catchment-scale water resources management, a 1013-year (1000–2012 common era (CE)) annual rainfall reconstruction was produced fo...

Ice cores provide some of the best-dated and most comprehensive proxy records, as they yield a vast and growing array of proxy indicators. Selecting a site for ice core drilling is nonetheless challenging, as the assessment of potential new sites needs to consider a variety of factors. Here, we demonstrate a systematic approach to site selection fo...

Radiocarbon (14C) plays a crucial role in global carbon cycle investigations, with published measurements from modern day observations and pre-industrial measurements from tree rings. The 14C-CO2 pulse produced in the atmosphere by nuclear weapons testing in the 1960’s is also incorporated in air in open pores of firn before close-off in bubbles in...

Understanding the long term trends in sea ice coverage is important, particularly in the context of recent reports of increases in Antarctic sea ice extent. Prior to the satellite era, ice core records have been used as a proxy for past sea ice extent in Antarctica, allowing investigations of the natural variability of Antarctic sea ice extent. The...

Contiguous measurements of water stable isotope ratios (δ18O and δD) have been performed along the entire length of the Aurora Basin North (ABN) ice core. The 303 m ice core extracted at ABN, 550 km inland of Australia’s Casey station, provides a climate record at seasonal to decadal resolution for this region of East Antarctica spanning the past ~...

Wind activity across open water of the Southern Ocean is the dominant source for sea-salts at Law Dome. Links between the sub-annual sea-salt record and wind-driven climate patterns have been previously demonstrated with ENSO and IPO signals found in the summer record and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) and strength of the Antarctic High in the win...

Computing correlation between data-series is a ubiquitous method in the geosciences and elsewhere, which is especially useful when accompanied with confidence intervals that take into account the auto-correlation in the data-series themselves. However, not all data series are evenly sampled, either because of inherent non-uniform sampling or becaus...

Ice cores provide an important means to estimate sulfate aerosol loadings for past volcanic events, and hence to estimate the climate forcing of these events. Snow deposition is influenced by the physical characteristics of the site, including local and regional atmospheric circulation patterns and the relative importance of deposition with precipi...

We present a new age model for the Dome Summit South (DSS) ice core from Law Dome, East Antarctica. This new model augments the annually dated upper section of the existing ice-core chronology with a calculated age model that is constrained by 11 age ties. Here, we use a continuous piece-wise fit to a linear vertical velocity profile. Specifically,...

Selecting the best site for ice core drilling is essential, as retrieving a new ice core record is logistically challenging, time consuming and expensive. Assessments of new sites need to consider a variety of factors encompassing all of these concerns. With this in mind, we demonstrate a systematic approach to site selection for a new East Antarct...

Rainfall in Australia exhibits high multi-decadal variability, yet the short (~100 years) instrumental record and dearth of high resolution proxy records from many regions of the country hinders a full understanding of the features and climatic drivers of this high variability. Subsequently, statistics calculated from the instrumental record do not...