East Asia winter monsoon variations on a millennial time-scale before the last glacial-interglacial cycle

Grain size and magnetic susceptibility measurements on samples from a typical loess-palaeosol sequence on the central Chinese Loess Plateau are used to reconstruct the Pleistocene East Asian monsoon climate. The coarse-grained fraction, i.e. the weight percentage > 30 mu m of the bulk grain-size...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lu, HY, Van Huissteden, KO, An, ZS, Nugteren, G, Vandenberghe, J
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: WILEY 1999
Subjects:
East Asia winter monsoon
millennial time-scale variability
Middle and Early Pleistocene
Physical Geography
Geology
GRAIN-SIZE ANALYSIS
NORTH-ATLANTIC
CENTRAL CHINA
CLIMATE INSTABILITY
LOESS STRATIGRAPHY
HEINRICH EVENTS
PACIFIC-OCEAN
RECORD
VARIABILITY
OSCILLATIONS
Geography
Physical
Geosciences
Multidisciplinary
Pacific
North Atlantic
Online Access:http://ir.ieecas.cn/handle/361006/11930
https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1417(199903)14:2<101::AID-JQS433>3.3.CO;2-D
Description
Summary:Grain size and magnetic susceptibility measurements on samples from a typical loess-palaeosol sequence on the central Chinese Loess Plateau are used to reconstruct the Pleistocene East Asian monsoon climate. The coarse-grained fraction, i.e. the weight percentage > 30 mu m of the bulk grain-size distribution, is used as a sensitive proxy index of the East Asia winter monsoon strength. On the basis of an absolute time-scale, time-series variations of this proxy show that winter monsoon strengths varied on millennial time-scales during the periods 145-165, 240-280, 320-350, 390-440, 600-640, 860-890, 900-930 and 1330-1400 kyr BP. The wavelength of these climatic oscillations varied between 1.89 and 4.0 kyr, as is shown by spectral analysis using the multitaper method. Although numerical simulation experiments show that high frequencies also can arise from measurement errors in the grain-size analysis, the frequencies prove to be sufficiently stable when the spectral analysis is repeated with a different number of tapers. For the time being, we do not correlate these climatic oscillations with palaeoclimatic records in the North Atlantic deep-sea sediments because both time-scales need to be further improved. Our data, however, certainly demonstrate that millennial-scale East Asian winter monsoon variations in the last 1.4 million years can be detected from terrestrial loess records. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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