Showing papers in "Quaternary Science Reviews in 2013"

TL;DR: In a recent review as discussed by the authors, the authors revisited these key studies emphasizing their continuing influence on Quaternary research and incorporating relatively recent investigations to interpret the nature of postglacial sea-level change around Australia.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors synthesize existing sedimentary charcoal records to reconstruct Holocene fire history at regional, continental and global scales, and compare the two potential controls of burning at these broad scales to assess their relative importance on trends in biomass burning.

TL;DR: Comparison of published species optima indicate that a number of models have little or no predictive power outside their current spatial setting and experiments using simulated training sets of known properties demonstrate how changes in secondary “nuisance” variables can lead to large, consistent, and interpretable trends in a reconstruction that are completely spurious.

TL;DR: Proglacial lakes are ubiquitous within the Quaternary record and can provide exceptional breadth and depth of palaeoenvironmental information as discussed by the authors, and the importance of proglacial lakes from a geological perspective.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors synthesize paleo-environmental data that have been used to infer changes in Southern Hemisphere westerly winds during the last glacial cycle and find that any hypothesis of LGM wind and climate change needs to provide a plausible explanation for increased moisture on the west coast of continents, cooler temperatures and higher productivity in the Subantarctic Zone, and reductions in Agulhas leakage around southern Africa.

TL;DR: This work recommends future research pathways, including development of intermediate proxy system models for important sensors, archives, and observations; linkingproxy system models to climate system models; hypothesis development and evaluation; more realistic multi-archive, multi-observation network design; examination of proxy system behavior under extreme conditions; and generalized modeling of the total uncertainty in paleoclimate reconstructions derived from paleo-OBservations.

TL;DR: In this article, the role of proximal deserts and rivers in contributing dust to the Chinese Loess Plateau was investigated using zircon U-Pb, fission track and double dating with heavy mineral analysis.

TL;DR: In this article, an important role of sea ice in the global biogeochemical cycles, promoted by active biological and chemical processes within the sea ice, fluid and gas exchanges at the sea-ice interface through an often permeable sea ice cover, and tight physical, biological, and chemical interactions between the Sea ice, the ocean and the atmosphere.

TL;DR: In this article, a model of alternating high and low climate variability for tropical Africa further implies that specific environmental indicators reflect different aspects of East African environmental dynamics, and the model may help reconcile some of the conflicting interpretations about the environmental drivers of hominin evolution.

TL;DR: In this article, a comprehensive Holocene (10,000 years) reconstruction of the flood frequency in the Central European Alps combining 15 lacustrine sediment records is presented, which provides an extensive catalog of flood deposits, which were generated by flood-induced underflows delivering terrestrial material to the lake floors.

TL;DR: A review of the use of IP25 as a proxy for sea ice is given in this article, where the authors highlight the importance of rigorous analytical identification and quantification of the IP25, especially if measurements of this biomarker are going to be used for quantitative sea ice reconstructions, rather than qualitative analyses alone.

TL;DR: The Kawakawa/Oruanui tephra (KOT) is a key chronostratigraphic marker in terrestrial and marine deposits of the New Zealand (NZ) sector of the southwest Pacific as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: This paper presented a synthesis of climate proxy data from tropical Australasia spanning the last 30,000 years that incorporates deep sea core, coral, speleothem, pollen, charcoal and terrestrial sedimentary records.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe and characterise these tephras based on major element glass composition, which is useful for the identification and correlation of these tectras and the age models of the records in which they are found.

TL;DR: In this article, 35 radiocarbon ages from wheat seeds collected from 18 sites between western (Xinjiang Province) and eastern (Henan Province) China were presented, and the earliest wheat ages cluster around 2100-1800 BCE in northern China's Hexi corridor of Gansu Province, where millet was already a well-established crop.

TL;DR: A detailed lake level curve for Lake Lisan (the Last Glacial Dead Sea) reveals a high frequency of abrupt fluctuations during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS3) compared to the relatively high stand characterizing MIS2, and the significantly lower Holocene lake as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors report new calendar ages for 24 widespread marker tephras erupted since 30,000 calendar (cal.) years ago in New Zealand to help facilitate their use as chronostratigraphic dating tools for the New Zealand climate event stratigraphy (NZ-CES).

TL;DR: A meta-analysis identifies spore types that are commonly found to be indicative of large herbivores and their geographical ranges, linkages between these spores and their biological origin, and the most appropriate quantitative method to express their abundance through time and across sites.

TL;DR: The most comprehensive global data set of ages for large (>1 km3) late Quaternary submarine landslides that has been compiled to date has been analyzed in this article, showing that there is no evidence for an immediate influence of rapid sedimentation on slope stability as failures tend to occur several thousand years after periods of increased sedimentation rates.

TL;DR: In this article, 57 new 10Be ages are defined for the Ladakh and Pangong Ranges in Northwest India, and five new local glacial stages are defined, from the oldest to the youngest.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a revised stratigraphy and a continuous high-resolution record of grain-size, magnetic susceptibility and organic carbon δ13C of the famous Dolni Vestonice (DV) loess sequence in the Moravian region of the Czech Republic.

TL;DR: In this paper, a synthesis of marine and terrestrial climate records, combining findings from the Southern Ocean, temperate, tropical and arid zones, identifies a complex response of climate proxies to a background of changing boundary conditions over the last 35,000 years.

TL;DR: This paper used 10 Be surface-exposure dating methods and detailed glacial geomorphologic mapping to produce a robust chronology of well-preserved terminal moraines deposited during the local LGM near Lake Ohau on central South Island.

TL;DR: Oxygen isotopic data from a suite of calcite and aragonite stalagmites from cave KNI-51, located in the eastern Kimberley region of tropical Western Australia, represent the first absolute-dated, high-resolution speleothem record of the Holocene IndonesianeAustralian summer monsoon (IASM) from the Australian tropics.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors synthesize existing palaeoenvironmental data from the arid and semi-arid interior of the Australian continent for the period 40-0 ka.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reconstructed the sea ice cover in terms of mean annual concentration from the application of the modern analogue technique to dinocyst assemblages, using an updated database, which includes 1492 sites and 66 taxa.

TL;DR: In this article, an atmospheric modelling study is performed to determine likely changes in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) westerly winds during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) using LGM boundary conditions, the maximum in SH westerlies is strengthened by ∼+1 m s−1 and moved southward by ∼2° at the 850 hPa pressure level.

TL;DR: The history of research on the Late Quaternary Svalbard-Barents Sea ice sheet mirrors the developments of ideas and the shifts of paradigms in glacial theory over the past 150 years as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: In this paper, a detailed analysis of the geochemical provenance of individual sand-sized ice-rafted debris (IRD) deposited in the subpolar North Atlantic Ocean between MIS G6 and 100 (∼2.72 − 2.52 ) is presented.

TL;DR: Stable oxygen isotope (d 18 O) measurements of two speleothems, collected from Huagapo Cave in the central Peruvian Andes and with overlapping age from 1.1 to 1.4 ka, characterize tropical South American climate variability over the last 7150 years as discussed by the authors.