Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Letter
  • Published:

Glacial to Holocene swings of the Australian–Indonesian monsoon

Abstract

The Australian–Indonesian monsoon is an important component of the climate system in the tropical Indo–Pacific region1. However, its past variability, relation with northern and southern high-latitude climate and connection to the other Asian monsoon systems are poorly understood. Here we present high-resolution records of monsoon-controlled austral winter upwelling during the past 22,000 years, based on planktic foraminiferal oxygen isotopes and faunal composition in a sedimentary archive collected offshore southern Java. We show that glacial–interglacial variations in the Australian–Indonesian winter monsoon were in phase with the Indian summer monsoon system, consistent with their modern linkage through cross-equatorial surface winds. Likewise, millennial-scale variability of upwelling shares similar sign and timing with upwelling variability in the Arabian Sea. On the basis of element composition and grain-size distribution as precipitation-sensitive proxies in the same archive, we infer that (austral) summer monsoon rainfall was highest during the Bølling–Allerød period and the past 2,500 years. Our results indicate drier conditions during Heinrich Stadial 1 due to a southward shift of summer rainfall and a relatively weak Hadley cell south of the Equator. We suggest that the Australian–Indonesian summer and winter monsoon variability were closely linked to summer insolation and abrupt climate changes in the northern hemisphere.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Monsoonal cyclicity in SST and wind trajectory in the tropical Indo–Pacific.
Figure 2: Proxy records for the winter AIM and other palaeoclimate records over the past 22,000 years.
Figure 3: Proxy records for the summer AIM and other palaeoclimate records over the past 22,000 years.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Webster, P. J. et al. Monsoons: Processes, predictability, and the prospects for prediction. J. Geophys. Res. 103, 14451–14510 (1998).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Wang, Y. et al. The Holocene Asian monsoon: Links to solar changes and North Atlantic Climate. Science 308, 854–857 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Wang, Y. J. et al. A high-resolution absolute-dated Late Pleistocene monsoon record from Hulu Cave, China. Science 294, 2345–2348 (2001).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Chao, W. C. & Chen, B. The origin of monsoons. J. Atmos. Sci. 58, 3497–3507 (2001).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Wang, P. Global monsoon in a geological perspective. Chin. Sci. Bull. 54, 1113–1136 (2009).

    Google Scholar 

  6. Gupta, A. K., Anderson, D. M. & Overpeck, J. T. Abrupt changes in the Asian southwest monsoon during the Holocene and their links to the North Atlantic Ocean. Nature 421, 354–357 (2003).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Liu, Z., Otto-Bliesner, B., Kutzbach, J., Li, L. & Shields, C. Coupled climate simulation of the evolution of global monsoons in the Holocene. J. Clim. 16, 2472–2490 (2003).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Miller, G. et al. Sensitivity of the Australian Monsoon to insolation and vegetation: Implications for human impact on continental moisture balance. Geology 33, 65–68 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Johnson, B. J. et al. 65,000 years of vegetation change in central Australia and the Australian summer monsoon. Science 284, 1150–1152 (1999).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Magee, J. W., Miller, G. H., Spooner, N. A. & Questiaux, D. Continuous 150 k.y. monsoon record from Lake Eyre, Australia: Insolation-forcing implications and unexpected Holocene failure. Geology 32, 885–888 (2004).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Nott, J. & Price, D. Plunge pools and paleoprecipitation. Geology 22, 1047–1050 (1994).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Griffiths, M. L. et al. Increasing Australian–Indonesian monsoon rainfall linked to early Holocene sea-level rise. Nature Geosci. 2, 636–639 (2009).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Partin, J. W., Cobb, K. M., Adkins, J. F., Clark, B. & Fernandez, D. P. Millennial-scale trends in west Pacific warm pool hydrology since the Last Glacial Maximum. Nature 449, 452–455 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Naidu, P. D. & Malmgren, B. A. A high-resolution record of late Quaternary upwelling along the Oman Margin, Arabian Sea based on planktonic foraminifera. Paleoceanography 11, 129–140 (1996).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Kutzbach, J. E. Monsoon climate of the Early Holocene: Climate experiment with the Earth’s orbital parameters for 9000 years ago. Science 214, 59–61 (1981).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Sun, Y., Clemens, S. C., An, Z. & Yu, Z. Astronomical timescale and palaeoclimatic implication of stacked 3.6-Myr monsoon records from the Chinese Loess Plateau. Quat. Sci. Rev. 25, 33–48 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Clemens, S. C., Prell, W. L. & Sun, Y. Orbital-scale timing and mechanisms driving Late Pleistocene Indo-Asian summer monsoons: Reinterpreting cave speleothem δ18O. Paleoceanography 25, PA4207 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Lewis, S. C., LeGrande, A. N., Kelley, M. & Schmidt, G. A. Water vapour source impacts on oxygen isotope variability in tropical precipitation during Heinrich events. Clim. Past Discuss. 6, 87–133 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Turney, C. S. M. et al. Millennial and orbital variations of El Niño/Southern Oscillation and high-latitude climate in the last glacial period. Nature 428, 306–310 (2004).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Muller, J. et al. Possible evidence for wet Heinrich phases in tropical NE Australia: The Lynch’s Crater deposit. Quat. Sci. Rev. 27, 468–475 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Kitoh, A. & Murakami, S. Tropical Pacific climate at the mid-Holocene and the Last Glacial Maximum simulated by a coupled ocean–atmosphere general circulation model. Paleoceanography 17, 1047 (2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Zhang, R. & Delworth, T. L. Simulated tropical response to a substantial weakening of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation. J. Clim. 18, 1853–1860 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Mohtadi, M. et al. Low-latitude control on seasonal and interannual changes in planktonic foraminiferal flux and shell geochemistry off south Java: A sediment trap study. Paleoceanography 24, PA1201 (2009).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Qu, T., Du, Y., Strachan, J., Meyers, G. & Slingo, J. M. Sea surface temperature and its variability in the Indonesian region. Oceanography 18, 50–62 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Grootes, P. M. & Stuiver, M. Oxygen 18/16 variability in Greenland snow and ice with 10−3 to 105-year time resolution. J. Geophys. Res. 102 No. C12, 26455–26470 (1997).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Wang, Y. et al. Millennial- and orbital-scale changes in the East Asian monsoon over the past 224,000 years. Nature 451, 1090–1093 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Stenni, B. et al. A late-glacial high-resolution site and source temperature record derived from the EPICA Dome C isotope records (East Antarctica). Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 217, 183–195 (2004).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to M. Segl, B. Meyer-Schack, M. Klann, H. Buschoff, V. Lukies and I. Meyer for technical support. This study was funded by the German Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (PABESIA) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, HE 3412/15-1). D.W.O.’s participation was funded by the US National Science Foundation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

M.M. was responsible for oxygen isotope analyses and G. bulloides counts, J-B.W.S. was responsible for the grain-size data, R.D. and D.W.O. were responsible for the radiocarbon analyses, M.M. and S.S. were responsible for the X-ray fluorescence and lithogenic data, D.H. was chief investigator and A.L. was partner investigator, M.M., D.W.O. and S.S. wrote the paper; all the authors discussed the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mahyar Mohtadi.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Information (PDF 2270 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Mohtadi, M., Oppo, D., Steinke, S. et al. Glacial to Holocene swings of the Australian–Indonesian monsoon. Nature Geosci 4, 540–544 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1209

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1209

This article is cited by

Search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing