The disappearance of glaciers in the Tien Shan Mountains in Central Asia at the end of Pleistocene

Abstract

Glaciers in Central Asia are among the largest ice masses in the Eurasian continent and have supplied vital water to local inhabitants for thousands of years. The glaciers in this region are generally believed to be remnants of the last deglaciation, however, glacier variability in the central Asian mountains since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) has not been well documented. Here, we report an 86.87 m-deep ice core record drilled on an ice cap in the Tien Shan Mountains of Central Asia. Radiocarbon dating of organic soil from the bottom of the ice-core borehole showed that the age of the soil was 12,656 – 12,434 cal years before present, coincident with the beginning of the Younger Dryas cold period (YD). This result indicates that the ice cap did not exist in the Bølling-Allerød period (BA), which was the warm period before the YD, and that the BA climate was significantly warmer than at present. It also indicates that the ice cap has never entirely disappeared in any warm periods throughout the Holocene. We estimated that during the BA its extent was 43% or less of the present glacier coverage in the mountains. Our results suggest that this region at the end of Pleistocene was considerably warmer than at present, and that most of the present glaciers in this region are not relics of the Last Glacial period, but are composed of ice formed during the YD and Holocene.