Nitrogen economy of alpine plants on the north Tibetan Plateau: Nitrogen conservation by resorption rather than open sources through biological symbiotic fixation

AbstractPrevious studies show that there are substantial influences of winter–spring Tibetan Plateau (TP) snow anomalies on the Asian summer monsoon and that autumn–winter TP heavy snow can lead to persisting hemispheric Pacific–North America-like responses. This study further investigates global atmospheric responses to realistic extensive spring TP snow anomalies using observations and ensemble transient model integrations. Model ensemble simulations are forced by satellite-derived observed March–May TP snow cover extent and snow water equivalent in years with heavy or light TP snow. Heavy spring TP snow causes simultaneous significant local surface cooling and precipitation decreases over and near the TP snow anomaly. Distant responses include weaker surface cooling over most Asian areas surrounding the TP, a weaker drying band extending east and northeast into the North Pacific Ocean, and increased precipitation in a region surrounding this drying band. Also, there is tropospheric cooling from the TP into the North Pacific and over most of North America and the North Atlantic Ocean. The TP snow anomaly induces a negative North Pacific Oscillation/western Pacific–like teleconnection response throughout the troposphere and stratosphere. Atmospheric responses also include significantly increased Pacific trade winds, a strengthened intertropical convergence zone over the equatorial Pacific Ocean, and an enhanced local Hadley circulation. This result suggests a near-global impact of the TP snow anomaly in nearly all seasons.

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A new species of Cleistocybe (Agaricales, Basidiomycota) from the Tibetan Plateau, China

Phytotaxa ◽

10.11646/phytotaxa.336.3.7 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 336 (3) ◽

pp. 286 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

HONG-MEI WU ◽

JIA-QI LUO ◽

KE WANG ◽

RUN-CHAO ZHANG ◽

YI LI ◽

...

Keyword(s):

New Species ◽

Tibetan Plateau ◽

Phylogenetic Analyses ◽

Morphological Observation ◽

Morphological Description ◽

The Tibetan Plateau ◽

Sequence Analyses ◽

The North ◽

Close Relationship ◽

A New Species

During field expeditions to the Tibetan Plateau, a collection of an undescribed species with several basidiomes was found. Morphological observation and DNA sequence analyses of the collection revealed a close relationship with Cleistocybe vernalis, the type species of the genus Cleistocybe. Therefore, a new species is proposed for the fungus with full morphological description accompanied by phylogenetic analyses. The discovery of the species extends the reported distribution of the genus from the north of America and Europe to Asia.

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“Tiny wiggles” in the Late Miocene red clay deposits in the north‐east of the Tibetan Plateau

Geophysical Research Letters ◽

10.1029/2021gl093962 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Rui Zhang ◽

Xiaohao Wei ◽

Vadim A. Kravchinsky ◽

Leping Yue ◽

Yan Zheng ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Tibetan Plateau ◽

Late Miocene ◽

The Tibetan Plateau ◽

Red Clay ◽

North East ◽

The North ◽

Clay Deposits

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Melting Ice Rivers

Dirty, Sacred Rivers ◽

10.1093/oso/9780199845019.003.0011 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

Cheryl Colopy

Keyword(s):

Global Warming ◽

Tibetan Plateau ◽

The Netherlands ◽

Sea Level ◽

The Tibetan Plateau ◽

Mount Everest ◽

The Past ◽

The North ◽

The World ◽

The Government

From a remote outpost of global warming, a summons crackles over a two-way radio several times a week: . . . Kathmandu, Tsho Rolpa! Babar Mahal, Tsho Rolpa! Kathmandu, Tsho Rolpa! Babar Mahal, Tsho Rolpa! . . . In a little brick building on the lip of a frigid gray lake fifteen thousand feet above sea level, Ram Bahadur Khadka tries to rouse someone at Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology in the Babar Mahal district of Kathmandu far below. When he finally succeeds and a voice crackles back to him, he reads off a series of measurements: lake levels, amounts of precipitation. A father and a farmer, Ram Bahadur is up here at this frigid outpost because the world is getting warmer. He and two colleagues rotate duty; usually two of them live here at any given time, in unkempt bachelor quarters near the roof of the world. Mount Everest is three valleys to the east, only about twenty miles as the crow flies. The Tibetan plateau is just over the mountains to the north. The men stay for four months at a stretch before walking down several days to reach a road and board a bus to go home and visit their families. For the past six years each has received five thousand rupees per month from the government—about $70—for his labors. The cold, murky lake some fifty yards away from the post used to be solid ice. Called Tsho Rolpa, it’s at the bottom of the Trakarding Glacier on the border between Tibet and Nepal. The Trakarding has been receding since at least 1960, leaving the lake at its foot. It’s retreating about 200 feet each year. Tsho Rolpa was once just a pond atop the glacier. Now it’s half a kilometer wide and three and a half kilometers long; upward of a hundred million cubic meters of icy water are trapped behind a heap of rock the glacier deposited as it flowed down and then retreated. The Netherlands helped Nepal carve out a trench through that heap of rock to allow some of the lake’s water to drain into the Rolwaling River.

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The Making of the Himalaya, Karakoram, and Tibetan Plateau

Colliding Continents ◽

10.1093/oso/9780199653003.003.0019 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Mike Searle

Keyword(s):

Tibetan Plateau ◽

Plate Boundary ◽

Indian Plate ◽

North West ◽

Geological Interpretation ◽

Mountain Ranges ◽

The Road ◽

The North ◽

On The Road ◽

The Himalaya

My quest to figure out how the great mountain ranges of Asia, the Himalaya, Karakoram, and Tibetan Plateau were formed has thus far lasted over thirty years from my first glimpse of those wonderful snowy mountains of the Kulu Himalaya in India, peering out of that swaying Indian bus on the road to Manali. It has taken me on a journey from the Hindu Kush and Pamir Ranges along the North-West Frontier of Pakistan with Afghanistan through the Karakoram and along the Himalaya across India, Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan and, of course, the great high plateau of Tibet. During the latter decade I have extended these studies eastwards throughout South East Asia and followed the Indian plate boundary all the way east to the Andaman Islands, Sumatra, and Java in Indonesia. There were, of course, numerous geologists who had ventured into the great ranges over the previous hundred years or more and whose findings are scattered throughout the archives of the Survey of India. These were largely descriptive and provided invaluable ground-truth for the surge in models that were proposed to explain the Himalaya and Tibet. When I first started working in the Himalaya there were very few field constraints and only a handful of pioneering geologists had actually made any geological maps. The notable few included Rashid Khan Tahirkheli in Kohistan, D. N. Wadia in parts of the Indian Himalaya, Ardito Desio in the Karakoram, Augusto Gansser in India and Bhutan, Pierre Bordet in Makalu, Michel Colchen, Patrick LeFort, and Arnaud Pêcher in central Nepal. Maps are the starting point for any geological interpretation and mapping should always remain the most important building block for geology. I was extremely lucky that about the time I started working in the Himalaya enormous advances in almost all aspects of geology were happening at a rapid pace. It was the perfect time to start a large project trying to work out all the various geological processes that were in play in forming the great mountain ranges of Asia. Satellite technology suddenly opened up a whole new picture of the Earth from the early Landsat images to the new Google Earth images.

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Roof of the World: Tibet, Pamirs

Colliding Continents ◽

10.1093/oso/9780199653003.003.0016 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Mike Searle

Keyword(s):

Tibetan Plateau ◽

High Elevation ◽

Tien Shan ◽

Palm Tree ◽

The Tibetan Plateau ◽

Wet Season ◽

North West ◽

Mountain Ranges ◽

The North ◽

The World

The Tibetan Plateau is by far the largest region of high elevation, averaging just above 5,000 metres above sea level, and the thickest crust, between 70 and 90 kilometres thick, anywhere in the world. This huge plateau region is very flat—lying in the internally drained parts of the Chang Tang in north and central Tibet, but in parts of the externally drained eastern Tibet, three or four mountain ranges larger and higher than the Alps rise above the frozen plateau. Some of the world’s largest and longest mountain ranges border the plateau, the ‘flaming mountains’ of the Tien Shan along the north-west, the Kun Lun along the north, the Longmen Shan in the east, and of course the mighty Himalaya forming the southern border of the plateau. The great trans-Himalayan mountain ranges of the Pamir and Karakoram are geologically part of the Asian plate and western Tibet but, as we have noted before, unlike Tibet, these ranges have incredibly high relief with 7- and 8-kilometre-high mountains and deeply eroded rivers and glacial valleys. The western part of the Tibetan Plateau is the highest, driest, and wildest area of Tibet. Here there is almost no rainfall and rivers that carry run-off from the bordering mountain ranges simply evaporate into saltpans or disappear underground. Rivers draining the Kun Lun flow north into the Takla Makan Desert, forming seasonal marshlands in the wet season and a dusty desert when the rivers run dry. The discovery of fossil tropical leaves, palm tree trunks, and even bones from miniature Miocene horses suggest that the climate may have been wetter in the past, but this is also dependent on the rise of the plateau. Exactly when Tibet rose to its present elevation is a matter of great debate. Nowadays the Indian Ocean monsoon winds sweep moisture-laden air over the Indian sub-continent during the summer months (late June–September). All the moisture is dumped as the summer monsoon, the torrential rains that sweep across India from south-east to north-west.

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Dzaekha game drives for antelope hunting on the north-western Tibetan Plateau

10.2307/j.ctv24q4zh6.20 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 427-446

Author(s):

Toni Huber

Keyword(s):

Tibetan Plateau ◽

The North ◽

Western Tibetan Plateau ◽

North Western

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First mid-ocean ridge-type ophiolite from the Meso-Tethys suture zone in the north-central Tibetan plateau

Geological Society of America Bulletin ◽

10.1130/b35500.1 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 132 (9-10) ◽

pp. 2202-2220 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Yue Tang ◽

Qing-Guo Zhai ◽

Sun-Lin Chung ◽

Pei-Yuan Hu ◽

Jun Wang ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Tibetan Plateau ◽

Ocean Basin ◽

Suture Zone ◽

The Tibetan Plateau ◽

Spreading Ridge ◽

North Central ◽

The North ◽

Central Tibetan Plateau ◽

Mid Ocean Ridge ◽

Ocean Ridge

Abstract The Meso-Tethys was a late Paleozoic to Mesozoic ocean basin between the Cimmerian continent and Gondwana. Part of its relicts is exposed in the Bangong–Nujiang suture zone, in the north-central Tibetan Plateau, that played a key role in the evolution of the Tibetan plateau before the India-Asia collision. A Penrose-type ophiolitic sequence was newly discovered in the Ren Co area in the middle of the Bangong–Nujiang suture zone, which comprises serpentinized peridotites, layered and isotropic gabbros, sheeted dikes, pillow and massive basalts, and red cherts. Zircon U-Pb dating of gabbros and plagiogranites yielded 206Pb/238U ages of 169–147 Ma, constraining the timing of formation of the Ren Co ophiolite. The mafic rocks (i.e., basalt, diabase, and gabbro) in the ophiolite have uniform geochemical compositions, coupled with normal mid-ocean ridge basalt-type trace element patterns. Moreover, the samples have positive whole-rock εNd(t) [+9.2 to +8.3], zircon εHf(t) [+17 to +13], and mantle-like δ18O (5.8–4.3‰) values. These features suggest that the Ren Co ophiolite is typical of mid-ocean ridge-type ophiolite that is identified for the first time in the Bangong–Nujiang suture zone. We argue that the Ren Co ophiolite is the relic of a fast-spreading ridge that occurred in the main oceanic basin of the Bangong–Nujiang segment of Meso-Tethys. Here the Meso-Tethyan orogeny involves a continuous history of oceanic subduction, accretion, and continental assembly from the Early Jurassic to Early Cretaceous.

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