Climatic variability in Central Indian Himalaya during the last ∼1800 years: Evidence from a high resolution speleothem record

Stalagmite Inferred High Resolution Climatic Changes through Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Northwest Indian Himalaya

“…Further, precisely dated stalagmite based multi-decadal records are rare through the Late Pleistocene-Holocene transition [42] although δ 18 O precipitation variability during Middle to Late Holocene has been obtained through U/Th dated speleothems [21,22,43,44]. The present study forms the foremost speleothem research in the NW Himalaya.…”

“…The present study forms the foremost speleothem research in the NW Himalaya. We may mention here that the speleothem inferred climatic variability from the locations dominated by the ISM [16,20,45,46] and the East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM) [47,48] has been well established but, as mentioned above, these also may not be precisely correlated with the Himalayan palaeoclimatic records [21,22].…”

“…It has been anticipated that the above records cannot be precisely correlated with the Himalayan records because of the additional role of Westerlies (in addition to the ISM) in the Himalaya [21,22]. The Himalayan region mainly experiences two seasons, i.e., summer and winter.…”

Panigarh cave stalagmite evidence of climate change in the Indian Central Himalaya since AD 1256: Monsoon breaks and winter southern jet depressions

“…A weaker monsoon should bring less precipitation across the Asian mainland. However, the data are ambiguous with much recent evidence suggesting wetter conditions during at least certain episodes of the LIA in Nepal (Denniston et al, 2000), northern India (Rühland et al, 2006;Kotlia et al, 2012Kotlia et al, , 2014Duan et al, 2013;Sanwal et al, 2013), and southern China (Chu et al, 2002;Chen et al, 2005) as well as northwestern China (Chen et al, 2009). However, no high-magnitude flood deposits have been identified in the six large rivers crossing central and western India suggesting that there was no really intense precipitation at this time and in fact that the conditions were probably drier from the 14th to the 19th centuries (Kale and Baker, 2006).…”

Stalagmite δ18O variations in southern India reveal divergent trends of Indian Summer Monsoon and East Asian Summer Monsoon during the last interglacial

“…A few speleothem data sets that have been reported from India have provided reconstruction of the past monsoon rain mainly during the Holocene (e.g., Sinha et al, 2007). Some cave locations are still being explored (e.g., Sanwal, et al, 2013;Lone et al, 2014). As long term temperature variations in the tropics are usually quite small (< a few C), the d 18 O of speleothem calcite is usually interpreted based on the 'amount effect', whereby the d 18 O of tropical precipitation decreases by~1.5‰ for every 100 mm increase in the monthly rainfall (Dansgaard, 1964;Yurtsever and Gat, 1981).…”