Orbital and Millennial-Scale Cycles Paced Climate Variability During the Late Paleozoic Ice Age in the Southwestern Gondwana

Orbital cycles are related to variations of Earth's orbit through time and exert profound control on glacial and interglacial climates due to changes in insolation. In this study, we aim to test whether orbital and millennial-scale climate cycles conditioned the deposition of rhythmites in the southern Gondwana during the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (LPIA). We present the first cyclostratigraphic study based on X-ray fluorescence records from a 27-m-thick interval of LPIA rhythmites in the southeastern border of the Parana Basin, Brazil. TiO2 and Fe2O3 records display cycles in the Milankovitch and millennial bands. Among millennial-scale variability, there are strong signals suggesting cycles with periods similar to the similar to 2.4-kyr Hallstatt heliomagnetic and the similar to 1.5-kyr Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles. We estimated an average sediment accumulation rate of 5.94 cm/kyr, which suggests that the rhythmites were deposited in a relatively distal setting, during deglaciation episodes paced by millennial-scale climate cycles. We interpret variations in concentrations of the terrigenous components TiO2 and Fe2O3 as indicative of glacial-interglacial changes, reflected by advances and retreats of glaciers under drier and wetter climate conditions, respectively. Here we show that these high-latitude glacial-interglacial cycles were probably paced by short eccentricity, as previously suggested for Carboniferous cyclothems in low-latitude deposits, and highlight the importance of millennial-scale climate cycles at controlling glacially influenced deposition at high latitudes. Our results for the LPIA are similar to patterns seen in Pleistocene records. Plain Language Summary In this study, we investigate a geological record from the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (LPIA), one of the major glaciations that ever occurred in Earth's history and increasingly compared to the Pleistocene glaciation. With high-resolution profiles that reflect the chemical composition of the sediments, we were able to identify orbital and millennial-scale climate cycles that show similarities to Pleistocene glacial and interglacial climate variability. Assuming that changes in the concentrations of iron and titanium in the sediments reflect paleoclimatic characteristics, we suggest that major advances and retreats of high-latitude glaciers during the LPIA occurred about 100,000 years apart, under drier and wetter climate conditions, respectively. Our results suggest that the behavior of glaciers during the LPIA was comparable to Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles.