Insights into late Quaternary vegetation and climate dynamics in Monsoon Asia obtained from numerical pollen-based reconstructions

• Main Author: Leipe, Christian
• Other Authors: [e-mail], m, Prof. Dr. Pavel E. Tarasov, Prof. Dr. Frank Riedel
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: Late Quaternary; Palaeoclimate research; Pollen; Non-pollen palynomorphs; Vegetation history; Human–environment interaction; ddc:500; ddc:560; ddc:561; Alpine Lake; Indian; Sakhalin
• Online Access: https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/6632; https://doi.org/10.17169/refubium-10831; https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:188-fudissthesis000000097729-1

The Asian monsoon is one of the major components of the world’s climate system. The monsoon circulation during the warm half of the year (the Asian summer monsoon) brings significant amounts of precipitation – mainly between May and September – to a vast area of South and East Asia stretching from the western Arabian Sea to the southern Russian Far East. The Asian summer monsoon is generally subdivided into the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) and East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM). Numerous studies have demonstrated that both subsystems have varied significantly over different time scales during the late Quaternary. In order to predict potential future climate dynamics in Monsoon Asia and to provide essential information to build adaptation strategies, it is crucial to understand the spatiotemporal patterns and the magnitude of past variations in the Asian monsoon activity and their relation to other components of the global climate system as well as extraterrestrial forcing factors. Despite considerable progress during the last decades, many issues are still unresolved. To improve existing climate model simulations and to broaden the knowledge about the Asian summer monsoon evolution, additional palaeoclimate proxy studies are required from both subdomains. This study mainly focuses on the reconstruction of past vegetation and climate dynamics in different regions of Monsoon Asia using numerical approaches (ʻbiome reconstruction methodʼ and ʻmodern analogue techniqueʼ) based on fossil and modern pollen assemblages. The set of employed fossil pollen records include one from a high-alpine lake (north-western Himalayas, India) located within the ISM domain and two from peat bogs located within the EASM zone including south-western Hokkaido (Japan) and north-western Sakhalin (Russia). All three climate archives are situated close to the modern summer monsoon limit. The results suggest that the initial post-glacial ISM strengthening temporally coincides with the termination of the Younger Dryas. The Holocene moisture ...