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The Global Paleomonsoon as seen through speleothem records from Asia and the Americas

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Abstract

The regional monsoons of the world have long been viewed as seasonal atmospheric circulation reversal—analogous to a thermally-driven land-sea breeze on a continental scale. This conventional view of monsoons is now being integrated at a global scale and accordingly, a new paradigm has emerged which considers regional monsoons to be manifestations of global-scale seasonal changes in response to overturning of atmospheric circulation in the tropics and subtropics, and henceforth, interactive components of a singular Global Monsoon (GM) system. The paleoclimate community, however, tends to view ‘paleomonsoon’ (PM), largely in terms of regional circulation phenomena. In the past decade, many high-quality speleothem oxygen isotope (δ18O) records have been established from the Asian Monsoon and the South American Monsoon regions that primarily reflect changes in the integrated intensities of monsoons on orbital-to-decadal timescales. With the emergence of these high-resolution and absolute-dated records from both sides of the Equator, it is now possible to test a concept of the ‘Global-Paleo-Monsoon’ (GPM) on a wide-range of timescales. Here we present a comprehensive synthesis of globally-distributed speleothem δ18O records and highlight three aspects of the GPM that are comparable to the modern GM: (1) the GPM intensity swings on different timescales; (2) their global extent; and (3) an anti-phased inter-hemispheric relationship between the Asian and South American monsoon systems on a wide range of timescales.

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Acknowledgments

We thank P.X. Wang for his support of our work. This work was jointly supported by NSFC 41140016, Xi’an Jiaotong University grant 93K40208000004, Institute of Earth Environment, CAS grant SKLLQG1001, and US NSF grants 1103403 and 0908792.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Global Environmental Change, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Hai Cheng

  2. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Hai Cheng & R. Lawrence Edwards

  3. Department of Earth Science, California State University Dominguez Hills, Carson, CA, 90747, USA

    Ashish Sinha

  4. Earth Observatory of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, 639798, Singapore

    Xianfeng Wang

  5. Instituto de Geociências, Universidade de São Paulo, Rua do Lago, 562, CEP 05508-080, São Paulo, SP, Brazil

    Francisco W. Cruz

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  1. Hai Cheng
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  2. Ashish Sinha
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  3. Xianfeng Wang
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  4. Francisco W. Cruz
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  5. R. Lawrence Edwards
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Correspondence to Hai Cheng.

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This paper is a contribution to the special issue on Global Monsoon Climate, a product of the Global Monsoon Working Group of the Past Global Changes (PAGES) project, coordinated by Pinxian Wang, Bin Wang, and Thorsten Kiefer.

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Cheng, H., Sinha, A., Wang, X. et al. The Global Paleomonsoon as seen through speleothem records from Asia and the Americas. Clim Dyn 39, 1045–1062 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-012-1363-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-012-1363-7

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