Dominant 100,000-year precipitation cyclicity in a late Miocene lake from northeast Tibet

Junsheng Nie; Carmala Garzione; Qingda Su; Qingsong Liu; Rui Zhang; David Heslop; Cristian Necula; Shihong Zhang; Yougui Song; Zeng Luo

doi:10.1126/sciadv.1600762

Dominant 100,000-year precipitation cyclicity in a late Miocene lake from northeast Tibet

Sci Adv. 2017 Mar 29;3(3):e1600762. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1600762. eCollection 2017 Mar.

Authors

Junsheng Nie^{1

2}, Carmala Garzione², Qingda Su¹, Qingsong Liu^{3

4}, Rui Zhang¹, David Heslop⁵, Cristian Necula⁶, Shihong Zhang⁷, Yougui Song⁸, Zeng Luo¹

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Western China's Environmental System (Ministry of Education), College of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu 730000, China.
² Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.
³ Department of Marine Science and Technology, South University of Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen 518055, China.
⁴ Laboratory for Marine Geology, National Oceanography Laboratory, Qingdao 266061, China.
⁵ Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200, Australia.
⁶ Faculty of Physics, Paleomagnetic Laboratory, University of Bucharest, Nicolae Balcescu, Sector 1, 010041 Bucharest, Romania.
⁷ State Key Laboratory of Biogeology and Environmental Geology, China University of Geosciences, Beijing 100083, China.
⁸ State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 17, Xi'an 710075, China.

Abstract

East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) precipitation received by northern China over the past 800 thousand years (ky) is characterized by dominant 100-ky periodicity, mainly attributed to CO₂ and Northern Hemisphere insolation-driven ice sheet forcing. We established an EASM record in the Late Miocene from lacustrine sediments in the Qaidam Basin, northern China, which appears to exhibit a dominant 100-ky periodicity similar to the EASM records during the Late Quaternary. Because evidence suggests that partial or ephemeral ice existed in the Northern Hemisphere during the Late Miocene, we attribute the 100-ky cycles to CO₂ and Southern Hemisphere insolation-driven Antarctic ice sheet forcing. This indicates a >6-million year earlier onset of the dominant 100-ky Asian monsoon and, likely, glacial and CO₂ cycles and may indicate dominant forcing of Northern Hemisphere climate by CO₂ and Southern Hemisphere ice sheets in a warm world.

Keywords: Antarctica; East Asian monsoon; Tibetan Plateau; eccentricity; ice sheets; orbital forcing.