An early–middle Eocene Antarctic summer monsoon: Evidence of ‘fossil climates’

A warmer and mostly ice-free South polar region prevailed during the early–middle Eocene, indicative of a low latitudinal temperature gradient. Climatic models mostly fail to reconstruct such a low gradient, demonstrating our poor understanding of the mechanisms involved in heat transfer. Here we describe a new phenomenon that shaped the southern high latitude climate during the early–middle Eocene: the Antarctic summer monsoon. Our palaeoclimatic reconstruction is based on 25 morphotypes of fossil dicotyledonous leaves from the early–middle Eocene fossil leaf assemblage of Fossil Hill from King George Island, the Antarctic Peninsula. We use a novel CLAMP (Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Program) calibration which includes new climatic parameters that allow us to characterise better the seasonality in precipitation. Our reconstruction indicates a warm humid temperate climate with strong seasonality in temperature and precipitation. Seasonality in precipitation indicates a rainfall rate of 6.4 ± 1.30 mm/day during summer (summer daily rate of precipitation; SDR) and a summer precipitation representing more than 60.3 ± 8.28% of annual rainfall (ratio of summer precipitation; RSP), which fulfils the definition of a summer monsoon in the modern world. This implies a seasonal alternation of high- and low-pressure systems over Antarctica during the early–middle Eocene. Such a climate regime would have impacted upon global atmospheric circulation and heat transfer. This climatic regime presents a challenge for climatic models and their ability to reconstruct accurately palaeoclimates at high southern latitudes and thereby understand latitudinal heat transfer in a ‘greenhouse Earth’ regime.