A lacustrine record from Lop Nur, Xinjiang, China: Implications for paleoclimate change during Late Pleistocene

Paleoclimatic information recorded in fluid inclusions in halites from Lop Nur, Western China

“…14 concluded that the coupling of continuous drying and variation in the supply source may have caused the complex chemical sedimentary sequence in the Lop Nur salt lake. The values of T h obtained from halite fluid inclusions showed that a hot and arid climate prevailed at Luo Nur at the end of the Late Pleistocene, which was consistent with the paleoclimatic conditions of glauberite formation 67 , as well as those indicated by pollen, magnetic susceptibility, and other environmental proxies 22,23,31 . Therefore, changes in the chemical composition of the brine due to supply source variations instead of climate change, may have caused glauberite deposition to cease at the end of the late Pleistocene.…”

“…The climate in the Tarim Basin is cold and dry in the winter, and hot and arid in the summer. A previous study showed that abrupt cold/warm events in the northern hemisphere correspond to lake sediment records in Lop Nur, Xinjiang 23 , indicating that environmental evolution in arid areas of northwest China is also influenced by global climate change on millennial-centennial scales.…”

“…Given the recorded T h MAX of fluid inclusions in the Upper Pleistocene strata from the Luobei depression (35.6 °C to 43 °C, Table 2), we inferred that paleotemperatures during Upper Pleistocene halite deposition may have reached 37.9 °C to 45.3 °C. Some researchers have suggested a westerly pattern of climate change, with a cold–humid and warm–dry climate dominating the Late Pleistocene in the Xinjiang area 22,23,28,31,63–66 . Our results showed that a hot and arid climate prevailed in Lop Nur during the Late Pleistocene, which was consistent with the paleoclimatic conditions revealed by the T h of fluid inclusions in glauberite from other studied cores in the Luobei depression (including ZK1200B, ZK1608B, ZK0700, ZK1611, and ZK0300) 67 .…”

A framework for Late Quaternary lake-level fluctuations in Lake Karakul, eastern Pamir, focusing on lake–glacier landform interaction

“…The important point to note is that such abrupt climate change signals in the North Atlantic are observed in palaeoclimate records of westerly dominated arid central Asia regions. For instance, geophysical and geochemical properties of CK-2 core from the Lop Nur region (eastern Tarim Basin) indicate that the four local cold periods were coincident with Younger Dryas Stade and Heinrich events 3, 2 and 1, respectively (Chao et al, 2009). Similarly, the multiproxy in the Chaka Salt Lake (eastern Qaidam Basin) suggests that the warm climate regime (13.9-12.7 cal ka BP) and the cold climate regime (12.7-11.4 cal ka BP) were correlated with the change from the Allerød interstadial to the Younger Dryas stadial episode (Xingqi et al, 2008).…”

“…Spatial and temporal tendencies of palaeolake histories, that the higher lake-level status is attributed to increase the effective moisture supply, can serve for understanding the dynamics of global atmospheric circulation transporting moisture to a given region (e.g., Street-Perrott and Perrott, 1993;Herzschuh, 2006;Chen et al, 2008). Furthermore, recent studies (e.g., Xingqi et al, 2008;Chao et al, 2009;Ghazleh and Kempe, 2009) have demonstrated long-distance correlations (teleconnections) between regional palaeolake events and global-scale climatic events recorded in the North Atlantic. Therefore, reconstruction of the palaeolake history in a closed basin is expected to provide significant information for not only modeling global circulation changes but also the investigation of forcing mechanisms for moisture evolution in arid/semi-arid regions.…”