Early Pleistocene climate in western arid central Asia inferred from loess-palaeosol sequences was published on Scientific Reports recently. This study, which reveals the arid and semiarid environment of western Central Asia is formed as least 2.4 million years ago, is written by Wang Xin, an associate researcher from the Key Laboratory of Western China’s Environmental Systems (Ministry of Education), College of Earth Environmental Sciences, LZU. It is one of the research findings on dust and loess in Central Asia made by Wang Xin.
The abstract of the above-mentioned paper is as follows:
Arid central Asia (ACA) is one of the most arid regions in the mid-latitudes and one of the main potential dust sources for the northern hemisphere. The lack of in situ early Pleistocene loess/dust records from ACA hinders our comprehensive understanding of the spatio-temporal record of aeolian loess accumulation and long term climatic changes in Asia as a whole. Here, we report the results of sedimentological, chronological and climatic studies of early Pleistocene loess-palaeosol sequences (LPS) from the northeastern Iranian Golestan Province (NIGP) in the western part of ACA. Our results reveal that: 1) Accumulation of loess on the NIGP commenced at ~2.4–1.8 Ma, making it the oldest loess known so far in western ACA; 2) the climate during the early Pleistocene in the NIGP was semi-arid, but wetter, warmer, and less windy than during the late Pleistocene and present interglacial; 3) orbital-scale palaeoclimatic changes in ACA during the early Pleistoceneare in-phase with those of monsoonal Asia, a relationship which was probably related to the growth and decay of northern hemisphere ice sheets.
(Translated by Chen Yan; proofread by Zhu Yanlin)
