Siberian High Modulated Suborbital‐Scale Dust Accumulation Changes Over the Past 30 ka in the Eastern Yili Basin, Central Asia

Abstract

AbstractLoess contributes considerably to understanding the interactions between dust cycles and climate change. However, systematic and regional‐scale reconstructions of variations in the dust mass accumulation rate (MAR) using Central Asian loess are lacking. Based on the high‐resolution luminescence dating of 10 loess sections, we present a stacked suborbital‐scale (multi‐millennial‐scale herein) dust MAR record over the past 30 ka in the eastern Yili Basin, Central Asia, which shows obvious advantages at representing basin‐scale dust accumulation changes when compared with that based on individual sites. The stacked results in the eastern Yili Basin indicate that the MAR level remained high during the Last Glacial Maximum, followed by a dramatically decreasing trend throughout the last deglaciation, and exhibited a slight decrease during the early Holocene and early middle Holocene, followed by a clear increasing trend toward the late Holocene. We propose that changes in the Siberian High intensity dominantly modulated the aforementioned MAR variations. These results effectively link dust accumulation to the Siberian High, imply a possibly weakened dust activity in the Yili Basin at a long‐term scale under future global warming scenarios, and also provide a significant reference for dust accumulation reconstruction in other basins in Central Asia.