Late Pleistocene/Holocene wetland events recorded in southeast Tengger Desert lake sediments, NW China

Abstract

The area along the eastern and southeastern margins of the Tengger Desert, NW China, which is sensitive to the summer monsoon variations, was selected for studying the environmental conditions surrounding the transition between Paleolithic foragers and Neolithic farmer/pastoralists. Short cores were obtained from four lake basins in the southwestern Tengger using a hand-driven piston coring device. Proxies from these cores were supplemented by radiocarbon ages obtained from lake sediment cores, shoreline features and spring mound deposits. Together these records provide evidence of millennial-scale climate change events from the Pleistocene-Holocene transition to the present. Lake/wetland events, representing periods of more intensive summer monsoon, occur in the records at ∼12.7–11.6, ∼10.1, ∼9.3, ∼8.0, ∼5.4, ∼1.5, and ∼0.8 ka BP. They do suggest that century-to millennial-scale climatic cycles are characteristic of the Holocene in the southeastern Tengger Desert although the chronology must be considered extremely tentative.