General Introduction:
The Center aims to advance understanding of environmental changes and carbon cycles during Cenozoic and earlier periods, through interdisciplinary studies on loess, wind-blown red earth, lake deposits, marine sediments, speleothems, tree rings and archaeological remains. The Center investigates the formation and evolution of environmental systems in East Asian and globally, and their dynamic linkages to the global changes. The Center also explores relationships between environmental changes and human activities while clarifying interactions between the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. These efforts contribute to the development of “Integration of Earth's Sphere Dynamic Processes”, a new Earth Science theory. The Center supports national strategic priorities by providing scientific evidence to achieve "dual carbon" goals, tackle climate change, and serve for ecological civilization development.
Research Themes:
The Center conducts interdisciplinary research including sedimentology, stratigraphy, geomorphology, geochemistry, paleoecology, paleoclimatology, paleontology, geochronology, and numerical simulation on various sedimentary archives. By studying representative marine-terrestrial sedimentary sequences in China and adjacent regions, the Center seeks to understand the origins, processes, drivers, and mechanisms of Asian and global environmental systems, to reveal the relationships between environmental changes and human activities, and to develop a comprehensive Earth System Science framework. The main research fields include:
1)Monsoon Environment Evolution
The Center reconstructs climate and environmental variability across different timescales to understand the formation and evolution of the monsoon-arid climate system. It investigates phased changes in environmental systems and their modulation of climate variability at various time scales, and the monsoon-arid system’s response and feedback to global changes.
2) Sedimentation and Earth Environment
Through observational and simulation studies of physical dynamics and biogeochemical processes in Earth’s surface spheres, the Center establishes quantitative relationships between geochemical, biological, sedimentological indicators and modern climate parameters. It seeks to quantitatively reconstruct climatic and environmental variability through Earth’s history using multi-proxy geological-biological records and numerical simulation. The research also explores the processes and coupling mechanisms driving past global warming and element cycles, as well as the impacts of natural and human factors on Holocene climate change.
3) Climate-Ecological Changes and Environmental Archaeology
Integrating traditional paleontological methods with biomarker approaches, the Center reconstructs biological succession sequences across different environmental units to reveal the timing and processes of major ecological events in Asia. It examines the impacts of major climate-environmental events on biodiversity and ecosystem evolution. Furthermore, the Center establishes standardized diagnostic criteria for crop species and their wild progenitors, implements multidisciplinary investigations key archaeological and stratigraphic sections/drill cores to construct comprehensive evidence chains linking environmental changes, vegetation ecological evolution, agricultural origins, human migrations, and cultural civilization succession within robust chronological frameworks.
4) Deep-Surficial Carbon Cycle and Environment
Utilizing multidisciplinary experimental observations and numerical simulations, the Center examines the influence of deep Earth processes on element cycles and surface environmental changes through their effects on weathering and degassing. It investigates the biogeochemical cycles of carbon and other biogenic elements from deep time to present, enhancing the theoretical and quantitative understanding of the evolution, fluxes, and control mechanisms of Earth’s carbon-oxygen cycles and their climate-environmental effects at various scales.
Platforms and Personnel:
The Center houses 13 laboratories across five research domains including geochronology, sedimentology, geochemistry, biology, and modern process observation. Major equipment includes China’s largest 6MV accelerator mass spectrometer, a multi-collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (MC-ICP-MS), a stable isotope gas mass spectrometer, an X-ray diffractometer, a gas chromatograph, an organic element analyzer, a core scanner, and a Cenozoic Earth system simulation platform.
The Center currently employs 51 permanent staff members, including 26 research professors, 24 associate researchers/senior engineers, and 1 assistant researcher. The team has an average age of 46, with 37% of its members under 40 years old.
Recent Key Research Directions:
■ Formation and evolution of the Earth’s monsoon-arid system
■ Deep-surficial carbon cycle and biogenic element cycles
■ Impact of lithospheric movements on Earth's surface environmental evolution
■ Quantitative paleoclimatic reconstruction and paleoclimate simulation
■ Paleoecology and paleoclimate change
■ Prehistoric human activities, agricultural origins, dispersal patterns, and their interactions with the environment
■ Global biogeochemical cycles
■ Global deep-time ocean environmental changes and biological co-evolution
■ Formation mechanisms of deep-time sedimentary resources
