Abstract
Tibetan Plateau uplift has been suggested as the main driving force for mid-latitude Asian inland aridity (AIA) and for deposition of thick aeolian sequences in northern China since the Miocene. However, the relationship between earlier AIA and Tibetan Plateau mountain building is uncertain because of a lack of corresponding thick aeolian sequences with accurate age constraints. We here present results for a continuous aeolian sequence that spans the interval from >51 to 39 Ma from the eastern Xorkol Basin, Altun Shan, northeastern Tibetan Plateau. The basal age of the studied sequence postdates initial uplift of the Tibetan Plateau by several million years. Our results indicate that the local palaeoclimate was teleconnected strongly to the overall global cooling pattern, so that local enhanced aridification recorded by the studied aeolian sequence is dominantly a response to global climatic forcing rather than plateau uplift.
Highlights
Tibetan Plateau uplift has been suggested as the main driving force for mid-latitude Asian inland aridity (AIA) and for deposition of thick aeolian sequences in northern China since the Miocene
This hampers the understanding of any potential causality between early Tibetan Plateau uplift and AIA
Long continuous aeolian deposits have been used widely to trace the history of AIA
Summary
Tibetan Plateau uplift has been suggested as the main driving force for mid-latitude Asian inland aridity (AIA) and for deposition of thick aeolian sequences in northern China since the Miocene. Recent studies trace an initial Andean-like Tibetan Plateau to the early Eocene[11,12,13], but no related long AIA records are available for that time period. This hampers the understanding of any potential causality between early Tibetan Plateau uplift and AIA. To trace early stages of AIA development and its underlying mechanisms, we here investigated a 95.8-m red clay sequence from the Xorkol Basin (91°31′45′′ E, 38°54′42′′ N), which is a Cenozoic Basin within the Altun Shan, northeastern Tibetan Plateau (Fig. 1; Supplementary Figures 1 and 2; Supplementary Table 1; Supplementary Note 1). Our results indicate that enhanced Eocene AIA was mainly driven by global palaeoclimatic changes rather than being a direct response to the plateau uplift
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