End of Green Sahara amplified mid- to late Holocene megadroughts in mainland Southeast Asia

Michael L. Griffiths (), Kathleen R. Johnson (), Francesco S. R. Pausata, Joyce C. White, Gideon M. Henderson, Christopher T. Wood, Hongying Yang, Vasile Ersek, Cyler Conrad and Natasha Sekhon
Additional contact information
Michael L. Griffiths: William Paterson University
Kathleen R. Johnson: University of California
Francesco S. R. Pausata: Centres ESCER and GEOTOP, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM)
Joyce C. White: Institute for Southeast Asian Archaeology
Gideon M. Henderson: Oxford University
Christopher T. Wood: University of California
Hongying Yang: University of California
Vasile Ersek: Northumbria University
Cyler Conrad: Environmental Stewardship, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Natasha Sekhon: University of California

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Abstract Between 5 and 4 thousand years ago, crippling megadroughts led to the disruption of ancient civilizations across parts of Africa and Asia, yet the extent of these climate extremes in mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) has never been defined. This is despite archeological evidence showing a shift in human settlement patterns across the region during this period. We report evidence from stalagmite climate records indicating a major decrease of monsoon rainfall in MSEA during the mid- to late Holocene, coincident with African monsoon failure during the end of the Green Sahara. Through a set of modeling experiments, we show that reduced vegetation and increased dust loads during the Green Sahara termination shifted the Walker circulation eastward and cooled the Indian Ocean, causing a reduction in monsoon rainfall in MSEA. Our results indicate that vegetation-dust climate feedbacks from Sahara drying may have been the catalyst for societal shifts in MSEA via ocean-atmospheric teleconnections.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17927-6 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-17927-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17927-6

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().