Climates during Late Quaternary glacier advances: glacier-climate modeling in the Yingpu Valley, eastern Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) featured a major cooling of Earth's climate, after which the climate evolved in the largest reconfiguration of the past 100 ka. Despite its significance, full understanding of the climate history during and since the LGM is still lacking on the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Recent improvements in understanding glacial extents and chronologies in the Yingpu Valley, eastern Tibetan Plateau present an opportunity to estimate the glacial climatic conditions during and since the LGM. Using a relatively new glacier-climate model, this study reconstructs glacier advances in the Yingpu Valley and quantifies the related climate conditions during the LGM, Lateglacial, and Late Holocene glacial stages. The model results show that the Yingpu Valley contained ice volumes of ∼1.65 km3, 1.03 km3, and 0.29 km3 with equilibrium line altitude (ELA) lowering values of ∼500 m, ∼410 m, and ∼150 m in the three successive glacial stages, respectively. By examining other independent paleoclimatic reconstructions, it is concluded that the temperature decreased by 4.0–5.9 °C, 3.4–3.7 °C, 0.3–0.6 °C with the precipitation amounts being 40–80%, 80–100%, and 100–110% of modern values during the LGM, Lateglacial, and Late Holocene glacial stages, respectively. The climate estimates for the three glacial stages are generally in agreement with other climatic proxy records on the Tibetan Plateau and atmospheric circulation modeling results.