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Abstract Quantitative records of bottom water oxygen (BWO) are critical for understanding deep ocean change through time. Because of the stoichiometric relationship between oxygen and carbon, BWO records provide insight into the physical and biogeochemical processes that control the air‐sea partitioning of both gases with important implications for climate over Quaternary glacial‐interglacial cycles. Here, we present new geochemical data sets from Ocean Discovery Program Site 1240 in the eastern equatorial Pacific to constrain paleoproductivity (Ba_xsflux) and BWO using a multiproxy approach (aU, Mn/Al, Δδ¹³C, and U/Ba). This combination of approaches allows us to quantitatively identify changes in BWO and to parse local and basin‐wide contributions to the signal. We find that upwelling, not dust input, is responsible for driving productivity changes at the site. Changes in local carbon export are not the primary driver of changes in BWO, which instead reflect basin‐wide changes driven by processes in the Southern Ocean. Our BWO results provide direct evidence for the role of orbital precession and obliquity in driving deep sea respired carbon and oxygen concentrations. We find variations in BWO on the order of ∼50 μmol/kg that occur with ∼23 kyr periodicity during the substages of Marine Isotope Stage 5, and variations of ∼100 μmol/kg on glacial‐interglacial timescales. These findings have important implications for the role of insolation in driving deep ocean respired oxygen and carbon concentrations, and point to physical and biogeochemical changes in the Southern Ocean as key drivers of planetary‐scale carbon change. 

Abstract. The equatorial Pacific is a nexus of key oceanic and atmospheric phenomena, and its regional climate has critical implications for hydroclimate, the partitioning of CO2, and temperature on a global scale. The spatial complexity of climate signals across the basin has long posed a challenge for interpreting the interplay of different climate phenomena including changes in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Here, we present new, millennially resolved sediment core chronologies and stable isotope records from three sites in the equatorial Pacific's Line Islands region, as well as updated chronologies for four previously studied cores. Age constraints are derived from 14C (n=17) and δ18O (n=610), which are used as inputs to a Bayesian software package (BIGMACS: Bayesian Inference Gaussian Process regression and Multiproxy Alignment of Continuous Signals) that constructs age models and uncertainty bounds via correlation with the global benthic δ18O stack (Lee et al., 2023). We also make use of the new planktonic δ18O data to draw inferences about surface water salinity and to infer a southward-shifted position for the ITCZ at the Last Glacial Maximum (18–24 ka) and Marine Isotope Stage 6 (138–144 ka). These new chronologies and related datasets improve our understanding of equatorial Pacific climate and show strong promise for further surface and deep ocean paleoclimate reconstructions over the last several glacial cycles.