scholarly journals Drivers of East Asian millennial-scale climate over the past 400,000 years

Author(s):  
Yoshimi Kubota ◽  
Steven Clemens ◽  
Kyung Eun Lee ◽  
Ann Holbourn ◽  
Etsuko Wakisaka ◽  
...  

Abstract The history of abrupt climate change in East Asia is often discussed from hydroclimate proxies that record the isotopic composition of rainfall. However, the underlying mechanisms remain obscure because water-isotope proxies respond to a wide variety of environmental variables. Here, we investigated millennial-scale climate variability in East Asia over the past 400,000 years using paired foraminiferal oxygen isotope and Mg/Ca records from the East Asian continental margin, thereby resolving variance into temperature and rainfall components. We found that the temperature and rainfall variabilities are largely asynchronous, with times when the global climate shifts from interglacial to glacial periods being the notable exception. These findings highlight the importance of both mean global state and magnitude of North Atlantic variability in determining the East Asian climate. Without a strong North Atlantic forcing, the regional feedback system might generate asynchronous temperature and rainfall variations, which is the background climate feature in East Asia.

Author(s):  
Timothy Brook

Navigation played a major role in the integration of East Asian polities and economies prior to and during the arrival of European traders in the 16th and 17th centuries. That arrival stimulated an increase in the volume of intra-regional trade in East Asia as Chinese merchants organized exports on a large scale to meet European demand, yet the history of the production of nautical charts in China has been little studied, due in no small part to the poor survival of sea charts and other documentation. The most important new addition to maritime charting in the past decade is the rediscovery of the Selden Map in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This map of navigation routes throughout East Asia is unprecedented, and may be seen as marking the beginning of the transformation of Chinese cartography under the influence of European mapping techniques.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
LEIGH K. JENCO ◽  
JONATHAN CHAPPELL

Abstract This article argues for a ‘history from between’ as the best lens through which to understand the construction of historical knowledge between East Asia and Europe. ‘Between’ refers to the space framed by East Asia and Europe, but also to the global circulations of ideas in that space, and to the subjective feeling of embeddedness in larger-than-local contexts that being in such a space makes possible. Our contention is that the outcomes of such entanglements are not merely reactive forms of knowledge, of the kind implied by older studies of translation and reception in global intellectual history. Instead they are themselves ‘co-productions’: they are the shared and mutually interactive inputs to enduring modes of uses of the past, across both East Asian and European traditions. Taking seriously the possibility that interpretations of the past were not transferred, but rather were co-produced between East Asia and Europe, we reconstruct the braided histories of historical narratives that continue to shape constructions of identity throughout Eurasia.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Yoshiyuki Kikuchi

Abstract East Asia occupies a substantial position in IUPAC today. The incumbent president for 2018-2019, Qi-Feng Zhou, is from China/Beijing, and three out of ten elected members of the Bureau are from East Asia: Mei-Hung Chiu from China/Taipei, Kew-Ho Lee from Korea, and Ken Sakai from Japan. This region is thus well-represented in the IUPAC leadership. However, this is not how this now global institution looked in the past. Its first president from East Asia was Saburo Nagakura (b. 1920) from Japan who assumed this office from 1981-1982, more than 60 years after the IUPAC was established in 1919. He was followed by Jung-Il Jing from Korea (2008-2009), Kazuyuki Tatsumi (2012-2013) from Japan, and Zhou. In terms of national adhering organizations (NAOs), Japan was the first East Asian nation admitted to IUPAC in 1921, but we had to wait until the late 1970s for all other national chemical communities in East Asia to be officially admitted to the IUPAC: The Chemical Society Located in Taipei in 1959, the Korean Chemical Society in 1963, and the Chinese Chemical Society in 1979. East Asia’s position in the IUPAC is the outcome of a rather long historical process.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 598-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph MacKay

Abstract International relations (IR) has seen a proliferation of recent research on both international hierarchies as such and on historical IR in (often hierarchical) East Asia. This article takes stock of insights from East Asian hierarchies for the study of international hierarchy as such. I argue for and defend an explanatory approach emphasizing repertoires or toolkits of hierarchical super- and subordination. Historical hierarchies surrounding China took multiple dynastic forms. I emphasize two dimensions of variation. First, hierarchy-building occurs in dialogue between cores and peripheries. Variation in these relationships proliferated multiple arrangements for hierarchical influence and rule. Second, Sinocentric hierarchies varied widely over time, in ways that suggest learning. Successive Chinese dynasties both emulated the successes and avoided the pitfalls of the past, adapting their ideologies and strategies for rule to varying circumstances by recombining past political repertoires to build new ones. Taken together, these phenomena suggest new lines of inquiry for research on hierarchies in IR.


2017 ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Edward W. Choi

While regional actors in the East Asian higher education sphere share a history of collaboration, they implement regionalization schemes largely based on different needs, goals, timetables, and customs. This piece presents a summary of key regionalization efforts and intitial indications for a path forward.


2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jong-il Kim

The total factor productivity (TFP) growth controversy and the recent economic crisis raise many questions about the future growth of East Asia. Our analysis of historical experiences shows that low TFP growth in the East Asian newly industrialized economies (NIEs) is a natural pattern of growth at the initial phase of industrialization. Empirical evidence shows that East Asian NIEs in recent decades have been proceeding toward an efficiency-based growth as developed countries did some time ago. The history of Latin America, however, indicates that the reform of old-fashioned institutions is needed if East Asia is to follow the path of the developed countries.


2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (10) ◽  
pp. 2954-2959 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanjun Cai ◽  
Inez Y. Fung ◽  
R. Lawrence Edwards ◽  
Zhisheng An ◽  
Hai Cheng ◽  
...  

A speleothem δ18O record from Xiaobailong cave in southwest China characterizes changes in summer monsoon precipitation in Northeastern India, the Himalayan foothills, Bangladesh, and northern Indochina over the last 252 kyr. This record is dominated by 23-kyr precessional cycles punctuated by prominent millennial-scale oscillations that are synchronous with Heinrich events in the North Atlantic. It also shows clear glacial–interglacial variations that are consistent with marine and other terrestrial proxies but are different from the cave records in East China. Corroborated by isotope-enabled global circulation modeling, we hypothesize that this disparity reflects differing changes in atmospheric circulation and moisture trajectories associated with climate forcing as well as with associated topographic changes during glacial periods, in particular redistribution of air mass above the growing ice sheets and the exposure of the “land bridge” in the Maritime continents in the western equatorial Pacific.


2001 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 444-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Walsh ◽  
William L. Chapman

AbstractIn order to extend diagnoses of recent sea-ice variations beyond the past few decades, a century-scale digital dataset of Arctic sea-ice coverage has been compiled. For recent decades, the compilation utilizes satellite-derived hemispheric datasets. Regional datasets based primarily on ship reports and aerial reconnaissance are the primary inputs for the earlier part of the 20th century. While the various datasets contain some discrepancies, they capture the same general variations during their period of overlap. The outstanding feature of the time series of total hemispheric ice extent is a decrease that has accelerated during the past several decades. The decrease is greatest in summer and weakest in winter, contrary to the seasonality of the greenhouse changes projected by most global climate models. The primary spatial modes of sea-ice variability diagnosed in terms of empirical orthogonal functions, also show a strong seasonality. The first winter mode is dominated by an opposition of anomalies in the western and eastern North Atlantic, corresponding to the well-documented North Atlantic Oscillation. The primary summer mode depicts an anomaly of the same sign over nearly the entire Arctic and captures the recent trend of sea-ice coverage.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yao Fu ◽  
Feili Li ◽  
Johannes Karstensen ◽  
N. Penny Holliday ◽  
Chunzai Wang

<p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is crucially important in the global climate system due to its role in the meridional heat and freshwater distribution. Model simulations and constructed AMOC indices suggest that the AMOC may have been weakening for decades. However, direct AMOC observations, introduced in 2004 in the subtropics (the RAPID program) and in 2014 in the subpolar North Atlantic (the OSNAP program), are not sufficiently long to capture changes dating back to previous periods. Here we use repeated hydrographic sections in the subtropical and subpolar North Atlantic through the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, combined with a box inverse model that is constrained using satellite altimetry, to analyze hydrographic changes and the AMOC. In combination with a state-of-the-art ocean state estimate, GECCO2, we show that despite dramatic hydrographic changes in the subtropical and subpolar North Atlantic over the past two and half decades, the AMOC has not significantly weakened over the same period. Our hydrography-based estimates also illustrate a remarkably stable partition of the subpolar overturning between the Labrador basin and the eastern subpolar basins on decadal timescales since the 1990s.</p>


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