Late Holocene Varve Chronology and High-Resolution Records of Precipitation in the Central Tibetan Plateau

Author(s):  
Kejia Ji ◽  
Erlei Zhu ◽  
Guoqiang Chu ◽  
Juzhi Hou

<p>Precise age controls are fundamental prerequisites for reconstructing past climate and environment changes. Lakes on the Tibetan Plateau are one of the important archives for studying past climate and environment changes. However, radiocarbon ages for lake sediment core are subject to old radiocarbon reservoir effects, which caused severe problems in constructing age controls for lake sediment cores, especially on the Tibetan Plateau (TP). Here we present a varve chronology over the past 2000 years at Jiang Co on the central TP. The clastic-biogenic varves comprise of a coarse-grained layer and a fine-grained layer observed by petrographic microscope and Electron Probe Micro Analyzer. Varve chronology is supported by measurements of <sup>210</sup>Pb and <sup>137</sup>Cs, which is further used to determine the radiocarbon reservoir ages in the past ~2000 years. The percentage of coarse-grain layer thickness within single varves was considered as proxy for precipitation as the coarse grains were mainly transported by runoff, which is highly correlated with local meteorological observation. During the past 2000 years, the precipitation records show centennial-scale fluctuations that are consistent with regional records. The varve chronology at Jiang Co provides a valuable opportunity to examine variation in reservoir ages on the TP and a robust chronology for reconstructing paleoclimate.</p>

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (8) ◽  
pp. 2688-2701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jinzhi Ding ◽  
Fei Li ◽  
Guibiao Yang ◽  
Leiyi Chen ◽  
Beibei Zhang ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yandong Hou ◽  
Hao Long ◽  
Lei Gao ◽  
Ji Shen

AbstractLuminescence dating technology has been used for chronological constraints on lacustrine sediments due to the ubiquitous materials (e.g., quartz and feldspar) as dosimeters, and a relatively long dating range, compared with the commonly used radiocarbon dating method. However, quartz dating on the Tibetan Plateau may suffer from dim and unstable luminescence signals. In the current study, we investigate a lake-related outcrop from the shore of Cuoe Lake on the central Tibetan Plateau. Both coarse-grained quartz and K-feldspar fractions were extracted, and OSL and post-IR IRSL signals were measured from these fractions, respectively. Combining the stratigraphy analysis and dating results, this study shows that: (1) quartz appears to be unsuitable for dating because of very dim natural signals and even anomalous fading (average g-value: 4.30 ± 2.51 %/decade). The suitability of the applied pIRIR protocol measured at 150°C (pIRIR150) for K-feldspar samples was confirmed by a set of luminescence tests; (2) compared with the luminescence-based chronology, the 14C age of shells from the same sediment layer yielded older age by ~7 ka, which is likely attributed to hard water reservoir effect in Cuoe Lake; (3) the lake level reached its peak and maintained high-stand during the early Holocene (~9.4–7.1 ka). This study highlights the applicability of K-feldspar luminescence dating when the counterpart quartz OSL is insensitive and encounters anomalous fading.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 3599-3608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianping Duan ◽  
Zhuguo Ma ◽  
Naiming Yuan ◽  
Lun Li ◽  
Liang Chen

Author(s):  
Cheryl Colopy

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.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maarten Lupker ◽  
Jérôme Lavé ◽  
Christian France-Lanord ◽  
Marcus Christl ◽  
Didier Bourlès ◽  
...  

Abstract. The Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River drains the eastern part of the Himalayan range, flowing from the Tibetan Plateau through the eastern Himalayan syntaxis and downstream to the Indo-Gangetic floodplain. As such it is a unique natural laboratory to study how denudation and sediment production processes are transferred to river detrital signals. In this study, we present a new 10Be data set to constrain denudation rates across the catchment and to quantify the impact of rapid erosion within the syntaxis region on cosmogenic nuclide budgets and signals. 10Be denudation rates span around two orders of magnitude across the catchments (ranging from 0.03 mm/yr to > 4 mm/yr) and sharply increase as the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra flows across the eastern Himalaya. The increase in denudation rates however occurs ~ 150 km downstream of the Namche Barwa-Gyala Peri massif (NBGPm), an area which has been previously characterized by extremely high erosion and exhumation rates. We suggest that this downstream lag is mainly due to the physical abrasion of coarse grained, low 10Be concentration, landslide material produced within the syntaxis that dilutes the upstream high concentration 10Be flux from the Tibetan Plateau only after abrasion has transferred sediment to the studied sand fraction. A simple abrasion model produces typical lag distances of 50 to 150 km compatible with our observations. Abrasion effects reduce the spatial resolution over which denudation can be constrained in the eastern Himalayan syntaxis. In addition, we also highlight that denudation rate estimates are dependent on the sediment connectivity, storage and quartz content of the upstream Tibetan Plateau part of the catchment which tends to lead to an overestimation of downstream denudations rates. Taking these effects into account we estimate a denudation rates of ca. 2 to 5 mm/yr for the entire syntaxis and ca. 4 to 28 mm/yr for the NBGPm, which is significantly higher than other to other large catchments. Overall, 10Be concentrations measured at the outlet of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra in Bangladesh suggest a sediment flux between 780 and 1430 Mt/yr equivalent to a denudation rate between 0.7 and 1.2 mm/yr for the entire catchment.


The Holocene ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 892-899 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiumei Li ◽  
Jie Liang ◽  
Juzhi Hou ◽  
Wenjing Zhang

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianping Duan ◽  
Lun Li ◽  
Liang Chen ◽  
Haoxin Zhang

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