Abstract
Palaeoceanographic records spanning the Oligocene provide insights into Antarctic ice-sheet dynamics in a world warmer-than-today, allowing us to improve future climate projections linked to global warming. Here, we present a high-resolution multi-proxy record from ODP Site 689 (Maud Rise, Southern Ocean), to investigate the short-term Antarctic ice-sheet variability during the late Oligocene. Our oxygen isotope composition of sea water record reflects large, obliquity-paced ice volume fluctuations from 26.2 to 25.2 Ma. These fluctuations would have resulted in changes in the types of rocks eroded as the Antarctic ice-sheet advanced/retreated. Indeed, the radiogenic isotopic compositions of neodymium and lead co-vary with the oxygen isotopes for most of the record and identify changes in sediment provenance and weathering rates linked to advances and retreats of the Antarctic ice-sheet. At the same time, the stable incongruent lead isotope signal observed confirms the presence of a major East Antarctic ice-sheet during the late Oligocene.
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Data availability
All data relevant to this study are available in the Supplementary Data files and in the data repository PANGAEA110 at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.988411111 and https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.988416112.
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Acknowledgements
This research used samples provided by the Ocean Drilling Programme (ODP). ODP is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and participating countries under the management of Joint Oceanographic Institutions (JOI), Inc. We acknowledge the AWI sediment core repository for providing the core-top samples. We are grateful to Daniela Müller and André Bahr for the grain-size measurements, and to Lukas Gerber for his support with the Pb concentration measurements. L.C. acknowledges Huang Huang, Moritz Hallmaier and Michael Bollen for helpful discussions. We would like to thank the editor and the two reviewers for their constructive comments, which greatly improved this manuscript. This project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—428548445. We acknowledge financial support by Heidelberg University for the publication fee.
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L.C. performed the analyses, the visualisation and wrote the original draft. L.C., S.B., M.G. and A.F. generated the data. J.L., M.F. and O.F. conceived the study. All authors participated in the methodology, the investigation, and all reviewed and edited the manuscript and approved the final version.
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Creac’h, L., Brzelinski, S., Lippold, J. et al. Short-term Antarctic ice-sheet dynamics during the late Oligocene. Commun Earth Environ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03217-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03217-4
