The Asian-Australian monsoon is an important component of the Earth's climate system that influences the societal and economic activity of roughly half the world's population. The past strength of the rain-bearing East Asian summer monsoon can be reconstructed with archives such as cave deposits 1, 2, 3 , but the winter monsoon has no such signature in the hydrological cycle and has thus proved difficult to reconstruct. Here we present high-resolution records of the magnetic properties and the titanium content of the sediments of Lake Huguang Maar in coastal southeast China over the past 16,000 years, which we use as proxies for the strength of the winter monsoon winds. We find evidence for stronger winter monsoon winds before the Bølling-Allerød warming, during the Younger Dryas episode and during the middle and late Holocene, when cave stalagmites suggest weaker summer monsoons 1, 2, 3 . We conclude that this anticorrelation is best explained by migrations in the intertropical convergence zone. Similar migrations of the intertropical convergence zone have been observed in Central America for the period ad 700 to 900 (refs 4-6), suggesting global climatic changes at that time. From the coincidence in timing, we suggest that these migrations in the tropical rain belt could have contributed to the declines of both the Tang dynasty in China and the Classic Maya in Central America.

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The processes of acquisition of viscous remanence and its decay in zero magnetic field are studied for three sets of palaeosol and loess samples. A linear behaviour of VRM vs. log t minus is obtained for 10-10 4 min. to 30 days of acquisition experiments. Linear correlation between the obtained coefficients of viscous acquisition normalized to saturation magnetization (Sa/Js) or frequency dependent magnetic susceptibility (Sa/χfd%) and the ratio of susceptibility to saturation magnetization (χ/Js), suggests that ultra fine SP/SD grains are mainly involved in the process of viscous acquisition. Non-linear VRM vs. log t behaviour is observed during viscous decay in μ-metal shielded space, being most pronounced for the first 10 min. of the experiment. It is supposed that this phenomena is due to the presence of composite grains (core/shell structure), formed as a result of low-temperature oxidation. The latter increases towards older palaeosol units.

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