The record of paleoclimatic change from stalagmites and the determination of termination II in the south of Guizhou

• Main Authors: Zhang Meiliang, Yuan Daoxian, Lin Yushi, Cheng Hai, Qin Jiaming, Zhang Huiling
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2002
• Subjects: Pacific; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.525.4691; http://www.karst.edu.cn/publication/Zhang Ml200401.pdf

Abstract A high-resolution climate record from 163.00 kaBP to 113.80 kaBP has been ob-tained through TIMS-U series dating and carbon and oxygen isotope analysis of the three large stalagmites from two caves in the south of Guizhou Province, China. The record of the oxygen isotopes from the stalagmites reveals that the undulation characteristics between the cooling event of the glacial period and the warming event of the interglacial period in the research area can compare well to those of ice cores, lake sediments, loess and deep sea sediments on the scale of ten-thousand years or millennium time scale. The climate undulation provided by the record of the stalagmites has a coherence with the global changes and a tele-connection to the paleoclimate changes in the north polar region. Our results suggest that the direct dynamics of paleo-monsoon circulation changes reflected in the record of the stalagmites might be caused by changes of the global ice volume, and in turn related to various factors, including the solar radia-tion strength at the mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, the southern extension of the ice-rafted event in the North Atlantic, and changes of the equatorial Pacific sea surface tem-perature at the low-latitudes. Using δ18O values, we have calculated the temperatures and the results show that the temperature difference between the penultimate glacial period (with an av-