ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Earth Sci.
Sec. Quaternary Science, Geomorphology and Paleoenvironment
This article is part of the Research TopicForaminifera as Tracers of Environmental Change from Present to PastView all articles
Transfer function and Hill sigmoidal function applied to reconstruct upper ocean thermal structure using planktonic foraminifera
Provisionally accepted
Douglas Villela de Oliveira Lessa1*
Thiago P. Santos2
Igor Venancio1Rodrigo N. Nascimento3
Ana Luiza Spadano Albuquerque4- 1Universidade Federal Fluminense Instituto de Quimica, Niterói, Brazil
- 2Universidade de Sao Paulo Escola de Artes Ciencias e Humanidades, São Paulo, Brazil
- 3Universidade Federal do Parana Centro de Estudos do Mar, Pontal do Paraná, Brazil
- 4Instituto de Geociências, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Brazil
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
We applied transfer function for planktonic foraminifera assemblages to reconstruct upper ocean thermal structure in two sediment cores of the Western South Atlantic in order to simulate and reconstruct past upper ocean thermal structure. These study sites are located in the continental slope covering the last 185 thousand years (kyr). Modern Analog Technique (MAT) simulations of thermal structures for 11 depths and their respective errors were inside the range of best analogs, and the reconstructions are reliable to be applied in reconstructions. The glacial–interglacial thermal variation we investigated indicate the glacial variations of the heat storage occurred in the upper 80 – 120 m in the subtropical margin. Based on this, four main scenarios of the heat storage in the South Atlantic were suggested for the western border of the Earth's orbit, trade winds intensity and the South Atlantic large scale circulation.
Keywords: Foraminifera, Paleoceanography, Pleistocene, South Atlantic, temperature, thermal stratification, transfer function and Hill sigmoidal
Received: 01 Oct 2025; Accepted: 08 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lessa, Santos, Venancio, Nascimento and Albuquerque. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Douglas Villela de Oliveira Lessa
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.