The Global Thermohaline Paleocirculation

Originally published in Russian in 2006, this is the first English translation of this important book on paleoceanography and paleoclimatology. Its initial publication was followed by a surge of interest in this subject prompting the author to revise and translate her original work. In the book, she successfully summarizes her own research over recent years and compiles an overview of up-to-date knowledge on past ocean circulation.

The key topics include:

- Modern thermohaline circulation and main stages of its development during the Cenozoic

- Methods and proxies of paleoceanographic reconstruction

- Variability of the meridional overturning circulation and paleoceanographic events in the North Atlantic during the last climatic cycle

- Influence of the global thermohaline circulation on paleoceanographic events in the Eurasian Arctic seas, the Northern Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea

- The role of the thermohaline circulation in global teleconnections in the Antarctic, Eurasian Arctic, northern Pacific and low latitudes Indo-Pacific.

Comprehensive investigation of hundreds of international publications and her own results, convinced the author that the global thermohaline circulation controls the remote teleconnections on millennial-scale and partly on centennial-scale, while short-term climate signals are mainly transferred by the atmosphere.

This revised and extended English edition provides the latest unpublished data, new figures and modeling results. The extensive reference list contains more than 800 publications and 140 new references.

Dr. Elena V. Ivanova is Senior Research Scientist and head of the Paleoceanography Team at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow. She is a member of the Russian Paleontological Society, The Micropaleontological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and was a Russian representative in IMAGES (the International Marine Global Change Study) from 1998 to 2007. In this book she reviews the data collected during 10 marine cruises including the IMAGES MONA cruise and a Russian-Norwegian cruise in the Barents Sea in 2004, where she served as a Chief Scientist.