Benthic δ 18 O records Earth’s energy imbalance

Oxygen isotope ratios (δ 18 O) of foraminifera in marine sediment records have fundamentally shaped our understanding of the ice ages and global climate change. Interpretation of these records has, however, been challenging because they reflect contributions from both ocean temperature and ice volume. Here, instead of disentangling, we reconstruct global benthic foraminiferal δ 18 O across the last deglaciation (18–11.5 ka) with ice volume constraints from fossil corals and ocean temperature constraints from ice core noble gases. We demonstrate that, while ocean temperature and ice volume histories are distinct, their summed contributions to δ 18 O agree remarkably well with benthic δ 18 O records. Given the agreement between predicted and observed δ 18 O, we further build upon recent insight into global energy fluxes and introduce a framework to quantitively reconstruct top-of-atmosphere net radiative imbalance, or Earth’s energy imbalance, from δ 18 O. Finally, we reconstruct 150,000 years of energy imbalance, which broadly follows Northern Hemisphere summer insolation but shows millennial-scale energy gain during the cold intervals surrounding Heinrich events. This suggests that, in addition to external forcing, internal variability plays an important role in modifying the global energy budget on long (millennial-plus) timescales.