Introduction to the special issue 'Quaternary Paleoclimate of the Western Pacific and East Asia': State of the art and new discovery

摘要

The objective of the special issue on "Quaternary Paleoclimate of the Western Pacific and East Asia" in Journal of Asian Earth Sciences is to publish high-quality scientific results that deal with paleo-proxy records such as marine sediments, terrestrial (speleothem, lake, loess), and historical archives and modern analogues for Quaternary paleoclimate presented in 2009 Annual Congress of Chinese Geophysical and Geological Society of Taiwan (May 6-7,2009 at Chiayi). Quaternary paleoclimate of the western Pacific and East Asia has become a hot issue in understanding global environmental changes. Since the discovery of the Dansgaard-Oeschger (D/O) events in Greenland ice cores and their subsequent counterparts in the marine sediments of the North Atlantic, search for these abrupt, millennial- to centennial-scale events across the globe has been intensified. In particular, the number of paleoclimatic records of the Northern Hemisphere has increased and shown tele-connections with the D/O events in Greenland. However, the evidence for such abrupt climate change from the tropics such as the western Pacific and East Asia is not clear although there appears to be correlative to climatic events shown in Northern Hemisphere and also in Antarctica.