Climate change, vegetation history, and landscape responses on the Tibetan Plateau during the Holocene: A comprehensive review

Abstract

Numerous studies of changes in the climate, vegetation and landscape responses of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) during the Holocene have been published in recent decades. However, several conflicting interpretations are evident within these studies and a comprehensive review of the topic is needed to reconcile them, and thus to provide an improved understanding of the history and forcing mechanisms of Holocene environmental changes within the region. Here we review the evidence for changes in climate (temperature, precipitation/moisture), vegetation and landscape attributes (glacier and eolian activity) on the TP during the Holocene. Our main conclusions are as follows. 1) The patterns of Holocene mean annual temperature change on the TP remain controversial; however, an early to middle Holocene summer temperature maximum is evident, which coincided with high summer insolation and a strengthening of the Indian summer monsoon (ISM). This suggests that the summer land-sea thermal gradient, impacted by the temperature of the TP, may be an important factor driving orbital-scale ISM changes. 2) Lake-level records indicate an optimum in moisture conditions on the southwestern (SW) TP in the early Holocene, while on the northeastern (NE) TP the optimum occurred in the middle to late Holocene. This out-of-phase or anti-phased relationship may be linked to the role of the ISM in dominating precipitation on the SW TP, while the westerlies and East Asian summer monsoon dominated the precipitation on the NE TP. 3) Most of the lake-sediment-based stable isotope records (δ18O and leaf wax δD) exhibit a pattern similar to that of stalagmite δ18O records from monsoonal Asia, reflecting the dominance of large-scale patterns of atmospheric circulation, rather than localized moisture changes reflected by lake level records. 4) A synthesis of pollen records reveals that the extent of forest was maximal in the mid-Holocene, while from the early Holocene onwards alpine steppe shrunk and alpine meadow and desert gradually expanded. 5) Evidence of glacier advance increased slightly during the early Holocene, decreased during the mid-Holocene, and then increased substantially after 3 ka BP. 6) The integrated ages of eolian sand and loess from the NE TP reveal that eolian activity intensified during the early and late Holocene. Site inter-comparisons reveal that regional climate change played a major role in modulating changes in vegetation and other landscape attributes. Overall, producing Holocene climate reconstructions for the entire TP remains a major challenge even though much progress has been made. Further improvements in terms of the spatial coverage of high-resolution paleoclimatic records with robust chronological control, and a deeper understanding of the specific climatic significance of several climatic proxies, will facilitate an improved understanding of how the monsoon and the westerlies interacted and their impacts on vegetation and landscape changes on the TP.