The area along the eastern and southeastern margins of the Tengger Desert, NW China, which is sensitive to the summer monsoon variations, was selectedfor studying the environmental conditions surrounding the transitio...The area along the eastern and southeastern margins of the Tengger Desert, NW China, which is sensitive to the summer monsoon variations, was selectedfor studying the environmental conditions surrounding the transition between Paleolithic foragers and Neolithic farmer/pastoral- ists. Short cores were obtained from four lake basins in the southwestern Tengger using a hand-driven piston coring device. Proxies from these cores were supplemented by ra- diocarbon ages obtained from lake sediment cores, shoreline features and spring mound deposits. Together these records provide evidence of millennial-scale climate change events from the Pleistocene-Holocene transition to the present. Lake/wetland events, representing periods of more intensive summer monsoon, occur in the records at ～12.7-11.6, ～10.1, ～9.3, ～8.0, ～5.4, ～1.5, and ～0.8 ka BP. They do suggest that century- to millennial-scale climatic cycles are characteristic of the Holocene in the southeastern Tengger Desert although the chronology must be considered extremely tentative.展开更多
基金supported by US NSF(Grant Nos.9410923 and 9729929)National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.40125001).
文摘The area along the eastern and southeastern margins of the Tengger Desert, NW China, which is sensitive to the summer monsoon variations, was selectedfor studying the environmental conditions surrounding the transition between Paleolithic foragers and Neolithic farmer/pastoral- ists. Short cores were obtained from four lake basins in the southwestern Tengger using a hand-driven piston coring device. Proxies from these cores were supplemented by ra- diocarbon ages obtained from lake sediment cores, shoreline features and spring mound deposits. Together these records provide evidence of millennial-scale climate change events from the Pleistocene-Holocene transition to the present. Lake/wetland events, representing periods of more intensive summer monsoon, occur in the records at ～12.7-11.6, ～10.1, ～9.3, ～8.0, ～5.4, ～1.5, and ～0.8 ka BP. They do suggest that century- to millennial-scale climatic cycles are characteristic of the Holocene in the southeastern Tengger Desert although the chronology must be considered extremely tentative.
