Supports· moderateYDIH-E038
Svensson et al. 2020: the platinum spike falls after the cooling began
- what the source states
- Placing the GISP2 platinum data on the synchronised Greenland chronology, the paper states: "The Pt spike occurs about 45 years after the volcanic quadruplet" — the "four large acidity spikes" by which the paper synchronizes the Younger Dryas onset between the hemispheres — that is, after Greenland cooling had begun and before it reached its minimum (its supplementary Fig. S1b).
- what we infer
- The first published placement of the Greenland platinum on the GICC05 timescale used for the cooling itself. If the onset and the spike are both read from the same synchronised ice, the platinum arrives decades into the cooling — so whatever delivered it cannot be what started the cooling, whatever its source.
- limitations
- A one-sentence aside in a chronology paper; the analysis itself is in the supplement, not set out in the main text.
- The offset depends on transferring the Petaev et al. depth series onto GICC05; it is a re-dating of one existing measurement, not a new measurement.
- Says nothing about the platinum's source, and nothing about the sediment platinum in North America.