Glacial to Holocene swings of the Australian–Indonesian monsoon
Date
2011-06Author
Mohtadi, Mahyar
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Oppo, Delia W.
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Steinke, Stephan
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Stuut, Jan-Berend W.
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De Pol-Holz, Ricardo
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Hebbeln, Dierk
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Luckge, Andreas
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https://hdl.handle.net/1912/4766As published
https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1209Abstract
The Australian-Indonesian monsoon is an important component of the climate system in
the tropical Indo-Pacific region. However, its past variability, relation with northern
and southern high latitude climate and connection to the other Asian monsoon systems
are poorly understood. Here we present high-resolution records of monsoon-controlled
austral winter upwelling during the past 22,000 years, based on planktic foraminiferal
oxygen isotope and faunal composition in a sedimentary archive collected offshore
southern Java. We show that glacial-interglacial variations in the Australian-Indonesian
winter monsoon were in phase with the Indian summer monsoon system, consistent with
their modern linkage through cross-equatorial surface winds. Likewise, millennial-scale
variability of upwelling shares similar sign and timing with upwelling variability in the
Arabian Sea. On the basis of element composition and grain-size distribution as
precipitation-sensitive proxies in the same archive, we infer that (austral) summer
monsoon rainfall was highest during the Bølling-Allerød period and the past 2,500 years.
Our results indicate drier conditions during Heinrich Stadial 1 due to a southward shift
of summer rainfall and a relatively weak Hadley Cell south of the Equator. We suggest
that the Australian-Indonesian summer and winter monsoon variability were closely
linked to summer insolation and abrupt climate changes in the northern hemisphere.
Description
Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Nature Publishing Group for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Nature Geoscience 4 (2011): 540–544, doi:10.1038/ngeo1209.