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Late Quaternary Upwelling Intensity and East Asian Monsoon Forcing in the South China Sea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Zhimin Jian
Affiliation:
Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
Baoqi Huang
Affiliation:
Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
Wolfgang Kuhnt
Affiliation:
Institut für Geowissenschaften, Universität Kiel, D-24118 Kiel, Germany
Hui-Ling Lin
Affiliation:
Institute of Marine Geology and Chemistry, Sun Yat-Sen University, Taipei, Taiwan, 804, Republic of China

Abstract

Foraminifera from two cores off eastern Vietnam and the northwestern Philippines, where modern summer and winter monsoon-driven upwelling occurs in the South China Sea, respectively, were analyzed to evaluate the changes in paleoproductivity and upper water structure over the last 220,000 yr. We observed enhanced organic carbon flux and a shoaled thermocline when upwelling intensified off eastern Vietnam during interglacial ages and off the northwestern Philippines during glacial ages. This indicates that the East Asian summer monsoon increased while the winter monsoon decreased during interglacial ages. Particularly, the upwelling reached a maximum off eastern Vietnam during late marine isotopic stage (MIS) 5 and off the northwestern Philippines during MIS 2, implying that the summer monsoon decreased gradually since MIS 5 while the winter monsoon displayed an opposite trend. The variations in upwelling proxies exhibit a distinct cyclicity with frequencies near 41,000 yr and 23,000 yr off eastern Vietnam, in contrast to a strong frequency peak near 100,000 yr off the northwestern Philippines. We suggest that the East Asian summer monsoon has been forced by changes in solar insolation associated with precession and obliquity, while ice-volume forcing is probably a primary factor in determining the strength and timing of the East Asian winter monsoon but with less important insolation forcing.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
University of Washington

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