Abstract
While Asian monsoon (AM) changes have been clearly captured in Chinese speleothem oxygen isotope (δ18O) records, the lack of glacial-interglacial variability in the records remains puzzling. Here, we report speleothem δ18O records from three locations along the trajectory of the Indian summer monsoon (ISM), a major branch of the AM, and characterize AM rainfall over the past 180,000 years. We have found that the records close to the monsoon moisture source show large glacial-interglacial variability, which then decreases landward. These changes likely reflect a stronger oxygen isotope fractionation associated with progressive rainout of AM moisture during glacial periods, possibly due to a larger temperature gradient and suppressed plant transpiration. We term this effect, which counteracts the forcing of glacial boundary conditions, the moisture transport pathway effect.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | eaay8189 |
| Journal | Science Advances |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was funded by the National Research Foundation of Singapore under its NRF Fellowship scheme (award no. NRF-NRFF2011-08 to X.W.), the EOS, the National Research Foundation and the Singapore Ministry of Education under the Research Centers of Excellence initiative, an NSFC grant (no. 41888101 to H.-W.C.), an NRF-NSFC joint grant (no. NRF2017NRFNSFC001-047 to X.W.), and a DPST research grant (award no. 042/2558 to S.C.).
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).