Malo Channel, Espiritu Santo Island - Stable Isotope and Elemental Data ----------------------------------------------------------------------- World Data Service for Paleoclimatology ----------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: PLEASE CITE ORIGINAL REFERENCE WHEN USING THIS DATA!!!!! DESCRIPTION: Extended Description of Methods and Proxy Interpretation All metadata and data for this study can be accessed via: https://doi.org/10.25921/cfz1-nt94 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- We demonstrate that El Nino-Southern Oscillation-related climate variability strongly influences coral d18O at Santo through local salinity changes that are associated with the position of South Pacific Convergence Zone and the movement of its associated salinity-front. Such a demonstration provides the "ground-truth" data that can be used to place paleoclimate variability estimated using existing fossil coral records from this region into a modern conceptual framework. We also evaluate different methods of combining coral d18O and Sr/Ca to reconstruct SSS and conclude that the coral d18O anomaly time series provides the best fit to recent in situ SSS data at Santo. Coral skeletal geochemistry offers the potential to reconstruct the sea surface salinity (SSS) history of the tropical oceans on seasonal to interannual and perhaps centennial timescales because of the strong link between variation in SSS and seawater d18O in tropical regions. We explore this potential using a monthly-resolved, 65-year record of skeletal d18O and Sr/Ca variations in a Porites coral from Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu. Porites lutea core was collected by Frederick W. Taylor of the University of Texas, Institute for Geophysics. The isotope data were analyzed at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science, on a Finnigan Delta Plus XL mass spectrometer and attached Kiel Carbonate Device with an analytical precision of 0.04 for carbon and 0.08 for oxygen (1 sigma) determined by repeated measurements of NBS 19 relative to VPDB. The elemental data were analyzed on a Perkin Elmer Optima 4300DV ICP-OES following the drift-correction methods of Schrag (1999). Analytical precision (1 sigma) for the Sr/Ca determinations is 0.16 per mil (0.014 mmol/mol), based on a laboratory standard solution of dissolved Porites lutea. Depth series were converted to time series using AnalySeries software (Paillard et al., 1996) to match Sr/Ca minima to SST maxima and vise versa. The HadISST temperature data set was used (Rayner et al., 2003) for the age model. The citation reference contains an error in the discussion section. Figure 6 contains d18O normalized by the standard deviation of each coral record. The magnitude of the trend in Vanuatu coral d18O is ~0.2, not 2.1 as described in the text. This affects the text where we speculate on the causes of such a large isotopic trend, but does not affect the conclusion that similar trends found in a variety of tropical Pacific corals lend weight to the idea that corals can faithfully record decadal-scale climate changes. Additionally, the age model has been adjusted over the 1992 calendar year to reflect a June 1992 sampling date as opposed to October 1992, which was mistakenly reported in the paper. The ages of samples preceding 1992.16 remain unaffected by this correction.