Publication Date:
2011-08-06
Description:
The modern Indian summer monsoon (ISM) is characterized by exceptionally strong interhemispheric transport, indicating the importance of both Northern and Southern Hemisphere processes driving monsoon variability. Here, we present a high-resolution continental record from southwestern China that demonstrates the importance of interhemispheric forcing in driving ISM variability at the glacial-interglacial time scale as well. Interglacial ISM maxima are dominated by an enhanced Indian low associated with global ice volume minima. In contrast, the glacial ISM reaches a minimum, and actually begins to increase, before global ice volume reaches a maximum. We attribute this early strengthening to an increased cross-equatorial pressure gradient derived from Southern Hemisphere high-latitude cooling. This mechanism explains much of the nonorbital scale variance in the Pleistocene ISM record.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉An, Zhisheng -- Clemens, Steven C -- Shen, Ji -- Qiang, Xiaoke -- Jin, Zhangdong -- Sun, Youbin -- Prell, Warren L -- Luo, Jingjia -- Wang, Sumin -- Xu, Hai -- Cai, Yanjun -- Zhou, Weijian -- Liu, Xiaodong -- Liu, Weiguo -- Shi, Zhengguo -- Yan, Libin -- Xiao, Xiayun -- Chang, Hong -- Wu, Feng -- Ai, Li -- Lu, Fengyan -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2011 Aug 5;333(6043):719-23. doi: 10.1126/science.1203752.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710075, China. anzs@loess.llqg.ac.cn〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21817044" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
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Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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