Detection of abrupt changes in East Asian monsoon from Chinese loess and speleothem records

• Published in: Global and Planetary Change
• Main Authors: Rousseau, Denis-Didier, Bagniewski, Witold, Sun, Youbin
• Other Authors: Géosciences Montpellier, Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Université de Montpellier (UM)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université des Antilles (UA), Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (UMR 8539) (LMD), Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-École polytechnique (X)-École des Ponts ParisTech (ENPC)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Département des Géosciences - ENS Paris, École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2023
• Subjects: Abrupt climate transitions; Chinese loess sequences; Millennial scale variability; Grain size; East Asian Monsoon; Stepwise increasing of the monsoon intensity; Earth Science; [SDU]Sciences of the Universe [physics]; Hulu; ice core; NGRIP
• Online Access: https://insu.hal.science/insu-04195487; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2023.104154

International audience Abrupt climate changes, especially at millennial timescales, have become a key topic in paleoclimatology because of their link with the tipping point theory and their extensive impacts on future climate scenarios. Although best documented in ice-cores and marine sediments, they are also recorded in different archives on the land, among which Chinese loess and speleothem records are of particular interest. These records effectively document orbital-to-millennial monsoon variability during the Pleistocene, but the dominant periodicity revealed by proxy records from these two types of archives is different. Nevertheless, millennial-scale oscillations recorded in Chinese loess and speleothem records seem highly similar over the last several glacial cycles. Such millennial fluctuations can be of varying amplitudes, and either more or less abrupt depending on the type of record. The observed abruptness usually depends on the sedimentation rates and sampling resolution in the loess and speleothem records. However, it can also be refined by comparisons with multiple physicochemical and isotopic proxies. Here, we apply a robust statistical method to detect abrupt changes in loess grain size and speleothem δ 18 O records. As a first step, we compared two reference records (i.e. the NGRIP ice-core and the Hulu speleothem δ 18 O records) of abrupt climate change to verify the robustness of our method in detecting the well-recognized abrupt events during the last glaciation. This result allows us, in a second step, to compare two high-resolution loess grain-size stacks (i.e. the CHILOMOS, and the LGS640 datasets) with the Chinese speleothem composite record built from Hulu and Sanbao records. Although visually observed rapid grain-size variations were previously interpreted as representing millennial-scale variations, our statistical analysis confirms that whether these abrupt climate changes can be robustly identified is highly dependent on the time resolution of the studied records. In a third ...