Interhemispheric dynamics of the African rainbelt during the late Quaternary

The spatial pattern of precipitation variability in tropical and subtropical Africa over the late Quaternary has long been debated. Prevailing hypotheses variously infer (1) insolation-controlled asymmetry of wet phases between hemispheres, (2) symmetric contraction and expansion of the tropical rainbelt, and (3) independent control on moisture available in Southern Africa via sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean. In this study we use climate-model simulations covering the last glacial cycle (120 kyr) with HadCM3 and the multi-model ensembles from PMIP3 (the Palaeoclimate Model Intercomparison Project) to investigate the long-term behaviour of the African rainbelt, and test these simulations against existing empirical palaeohydrological records. Through regional model-data comparisons we find evidence for the validity of several hypotheses, with various proposed processes occurring concurrently but with different regional emphasis (e.g. asymmetric shifts at the seasonal extremes and symmetric expansions/ contractions towards West equatorial regions). Crucially, variations in rainfall are associated with multiple forcing mechanisms that vary in their dominance both spatially and temporally over the glacial cycle; an important consideration when interpreting and extrapolating from often relatively short palaeoenvironmental records.

Robustness despite uncertainty: regional climate data reveal the dominant role of humans in explaining global extinctions of Late Quaternary megafauna

Debate over the late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions has focussed on whether human colonisation or climatic changes were more important drivers of extinction, with few extinctions being unambiguously attributable to either. Most analyses have been geographically or taxonomically restricted and the few quantitative global analyses have been limited by coarse temporal resolution or overly simplified climate reconstructions or proxies. We present a global analysis of the causes of these extinctions which uses high-resolution climate reconstructions and explicitly investigates the sensitivity of our results to uncertainty in the palaeological record. Our results show that human colonisation was the dominant driver of megafaunal extinction across the world but that climatic factors were also important. We identify the geographic regions where future research is likely to have the most impact, with our models reliably predicting extinctions across most of the world, with the notable exception of mainland Asia where we fail to explain the apparently low rate of extinction found in in the fossil record. Our results are highly robust to uncertainties in the palaeological record, and our main conclusions are unlikely to change qualitatively following minor improvements or changes in the dates of extinctions and human colonisation.

Late Quaternary environmental change in the interior South American tropics: new insight from leaf wax stable isotopes

Stable isotope analysis of leaf waxes in a sediment core from Laguna La Gaiba, a shallow lake located at the Bolivian margin of the Pantanal wetlands, provides new perspective on vegetation and climate change in the lowland interior tropics of South America over the past 40,000 years. The carbon isotopic compositions (δ13C) of long-chain n-alkanes reveal large shifts between C3-and C4-dominated vegetation communities since the last glacial period, consistent with landscape reconstructions generated with pollen data from the same sediment core. Leaf wax δ13C values during the last glacial period reflect an open landscape composed of C4grasses and C3herbs from 41–20ka. A peak in C4abundance during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ∼21ka) suggests drier or more seasonal conditions relative to the earlier glacial period, while the development of a C3-dominated forest community after 20 ka points to increased humidity during the last deglaciation. Within the Holocene, large changes in the abundance of C4 vegetation indicate a transition from drier or more seasonal conditions during the early/mid-Holocene to wetter conditions in the late Holocene coincident with increasing austral summer insolation. Strong negative correlations between leaf wax δ13C and δD values over the entire record indicate that the majority of variability in leaf wax δD at this site can be explained by variability in the magnitude of biosynthetic fractionation by different vegetation types rather than changes in meteoric water δD signatures. However, positive δD deviations from the observed δ13C–δD trends are consistent with more enriched source water and drier or more seasonal conditions during the early/mid-Holocene and LGM. Overall, our record adds to evidence of varying influence of glacial boundary conditions and orbital forcing on South American Summer Monsoon precipitation in different regions of the South American tropics. Moreover, the relationships between leaf wax stable isotopes and pollen data observed at this site underscore the complementary nature of pollen and leaf wax δ13C data for reconstructing past vegetation changes and the potentially large effects of such changes on leaf wax δD signatures.