Postdoc XU Deke and his teacher LU Houyuan present three sets of independent climate proxy data from a single core from the Okinawa Trough, East China Sea (ECS): one of terrestrial origin and two of marine origin.

The results provide robust evidence for oceanic and terrestrial environmental changes in East Asia during the past 40 ka. This study addresses the clear link between low-latitude oceanic and high-latitude terrestrial climate changes during the last deglacial warming.Their study revealed the occurrence of asynchronous marine and terrestrial signals of climate change in East Asia.

Their findings are based on three independent lines of evidence (terrestrial and marine records) obtained from the same core; thus they avoid the pitfall of age uncertainties arising from correlations of proxy records obtained from different cores with different radiocarbon dating controls.

Fig. 1. Diagram of selected pollen types from core DG9603, together with δ¹⁸O records from the Greenland ice core and cave stalagmites of East Asia. (Image by XU)

Fig. 2. Comparison of deglacial climate proxy records from core DG9603 with other proxy records for temperature and circulation in the Antarctic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Greenland, and East Asia. (Image by XU)

Deke Xu, Houyuan Lu, Naiqin Wu, et al. Asynchronous marine-terrestrial signals of the last deglacial warming in East Asia associated with low- and high-latitude climate changes. PNAS, 2013, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1300025110 (Download Here)