A 5000-Year Sedimentary Record of East Asian Winter Monsoon from the Northern Muddy Area of the East China Sea

Abstract

The variability of the winter monsoon is one of the key components of the Asian monsoon, significantly influencing paleoenvironmental evolution in East Asia. However, whether the winter or the summer monsoon is the dominated factor controlling sedimentary dynamics of the muddy areas of the continental shelves of the East China Sea is debated, due to lack of consistency between various winter monsoon proxies in previous studies. In this work, the sediments of the upper part of core ECS-DZ1 with several marine surface samples were studied in terms of sediment grain size and radiocarbon dating, and changes in sedimentary dynamics of the northern muddy area of the ECS over the past 5000 years were documented. The main findings are as follows: (1) regional sedimentary dynamics were low and did not significantly change since the middle Holocene; (2) coarse particles are the dominated component in the sediments; (3) a proxy can be derived to indicate changes in winter monsoon. Based on this reconstructed winter monsoon record, we found that this record was generally negatively correlated to the stalagmite-based summer monsoon variability over the past 3500 years, but positively correlated before that. Moreover, this record can be well correlated to changes in the Kuroshio Current and the Bond ice-rafting debris events in the North Atlantic on millennial timescales, inferring large-scale and common atmospheric dynamics across the Asian continent over the past 5000 years. Therefore, we concluded that the winter monsoon is the predominant factor controlling sedimentary dynamics in the northern part of the ECS and proposed that the contribution of coarse particles may be one of potential indices to identify the role of the winter and the summer monsoons in sedimentary evolution.

Chronology and Sedimentary Processes in the Western Ross Sea, Antarctica since the Last Glacial Period

“…The grain-size distributions were then analyzed using the VPCA, and the common signal of deep-sea dynamics was extracted by a PCA on the studied cores for paleoenvironmental inferences, following the procedures reported in previous studies [24,[42][43][44][45].…”

“…The coarsest components are correlated to ice-rafted debris (IRD), which originates from terrigenous debris carried by the ice shelf, icebergs, and large ice masses, while the medium components may be related to sea-ice transport [40,47]. However, for the finest component, it could be linked to the laser method [43,44,48,49], and thus excluded for later analysis.…”

Magnetostratigraphy of Abyssal Deposits in the Central Philippine Sea and Regional Sedimentary Dynamics During the Quaternary

“…The grain-size distributions are bimodal, with modal sizes of ∼4 and ∼25 µm (Figure 4a), and only minor differences in the grain-size distributions between the four studied cores, indicating a stable sedimentary environment during the period of deposition. Polymodal grain-size spectra can be mathematically partitioned (Ashley, 1978), enabling the separation of orthogonal modes (independent grain-size components/factors) to identify potential changes in input functions and/or sedimentary dynamics (e.g., Chen et al, 2020Chen et al, , 2021Yi, Yu, Ortiz, Xu, Chen, et al, 2012;Yi, Yu, Ortiz, Xu, Qiang, et al, 2012). Using a two-component lognormal function following the method of Paterson and Heslop (2015), two components are produced, EM1 and EM2 (Figure 4c and Figure S12 in Supporting Information S1), with modal sizes of 4.0 and 19.6 µm, respectively.…”

Color Reflectance of Coastal Sediments in the South Bohai Sea and its Implication to Orbital Forcing of East Asian Summer Monsoon

“…The Asian Monsoon plays a critical role in transporting large quantities of heat and moisture to the East Asia, the most populated region on the Earth (Zhang et al, 2008;Tan et al, 2021), and their evolution has been attracting a great amount of research attentions from geological records to numerical modeling (Jiang and Lang, 2010;Shi et al, 2012;Wang et al, 2014;Shi et al, 2019;Cheng et al, 2021). These geological records include loess deposits Guo et al, 2002;Sun et al, 2019), speleothem records (Wang et al, 2001;Cheng et al, 2009;Cheng et al, 2016), and marine and lacustrine sediments (Tian et al, 2008;Clemens et al, 2018;Yi et al, 2018;Chen et al, 2020;Xu et al, 2021). Because of the spectral difference between proxies, the variability and mechanism on orbital timescales are hotly debated, especially for the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM).…”