The Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences (XMAS 2025)

During the late Miocene and the Pliocene, changes in the Central American and the Indonesian seaways geometry are very important for ocean circulation and global climate. Various modelling studies have examined the separate effects of these two tropical seaways, especially their link to the onset of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets through changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation and associated heat and moisture transport. Although the existence of dual tropical seaways is closer to the reality, there are very scarce modelling studies exploring the co-effects of dual tropical seaway changes. Here we provide the results of modelling study on discussing their impacts the North Pacific circulation and tropical climate. Our results show that the combined shallow opening of tropical ways can generate an active Pacific meridional overturning circulation (i.e., absent in modern conditions) by which the meridional and zonal sea surface temperature gradient in the Pacific largely reduce. In contrast, a deeper opening of tropical seaways can not produce these changes in the Pacific ocean circulation. Moreover, our results show that the closure of the CAS leads mainly to aridification in northeastern Brazil, resulting in an expansion of tropical xerophytic shrubland and savanna in this region. The narrowing of the Indo mainly leads to enhanced aridification in eastern tropical Africa, and reduces the extent of tropical forests in eastern and northern tropical Africa, which is generally consistent with the data. The closure/narrowing of the two tropical seaways results in a superposition of the individual seaway’s effect, particularly over northeastern Brazil region, which exhibits enhanced aridi- fication compared to the closure of the individual CAS. The seaways’ changes are shown to be pivotal for the evolution of climate and vegetation over East Africa and northeastern South America to contemporary conditions.

Indonesian Seaway, Central American Seaway, Pacific ocean circluation, Pacific deepwater formation