Asian inland wildfires driven by glacial-interglacial climate change

Yongming Han; Zhisheng An; Jennifer R Marlon; Raymond S Bradley; Changlin Zhan; Richard Arimoto; Youbin Sun; Weijian Zhou; Feng Wu; Qiyuan Wang; George S Burr; Junji Cao

doi:10.1073/pnas.1822035117

Asian inland wildfires driven by glacial-interglacial climate change

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Mar 10;117(10):5184-5189. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1822035117. Epub 2020 Feb 24.

Authors

Yongming Han^{1

2

3

4}, Zhisheng An^{5

2

4

6}, Jennifer R Marlon⁷, Raymond S Bradley⁸, Changlin Zhan^{1

2

9}, Richard Arimoto^{1

2}, Youbin Sun^{1

2}, Weijian Zhou^{1

2

4

6}, Feng Wu^{1

2}, Qiyuan Wang^{1

2}, George S Burr^{1

2}, Junji Cao^{5

2}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, Center for Excellence in Quaternary Science and Global Change, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China.
² Key Laboratory of Aerosol Chemistry and Physics, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China.
³ School of Human Settlements and Civil Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China.
⁴ Interdisciplinary Research Center of Earth Science Frontier, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, Center for Excellence in Quaternary Science and Global Change, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710061, China; anzs@loess.llqg.ac.cn cao@loess.llqg.ac.cn.
⁶ Open Studio for Oceanic-Continental Climate and Environment Changes, Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao 266061, China.
⁷ School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511.
⁸ Climate System Research Center, Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003.
⁹ School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Hubei Polytechnic University, Huangshi 435003, China.

Abstract

Wildfire can influence climate directly and indirectly, but little is known about the relationships between wildfire and climate during the Quaternary, especially how wildfire patterns varied over glacial-interglacial cycles. Here, we present a high-resolution soot record from the Chinese Loess Plateau; this is a record of large-scale, high-intensity fires over the past 2.6 My. We observed a unique and distinct glacial-interglacial cyclicity of soot over the entire Quaternary Period synchronous with marine δ¹⁸O and dust records, which suggests that ice-volume-modulated aridity controlled wildfire occurrences, soot production, and dust fluxes in central Asia. The high-intensity fires were also found to be anticorrelated with global atmospheric CO₂ records over the past eight glacial-interglacial cycles, implying a possible connection between the fires, dust, and climate mediated through the iron cycle. The significance of this hypothetical connection remains to be determined, but the relationships revealed in this study hint at the potential importance of wildfire for the global climate system.

Keywords: Quaternary climate; biomass burning; carbon cycle; high-intensity fires; soluble iron.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't