The Indo-Pacific warm pool houses the largest zone of deep atmospheric convection on Earth and plays a critical role in global climate variations. Despite the region's importance, changes in Indo-Pacific hydroclimate on orbital timescales remain poorly constrained. Here we present high-resolution geochemical records of surface runoff and vegetation from sediment cores from Lake Towuti, on the island of Sulawesi in central Indonesia, that continuously span the past 60,000 y. We show that wet conditions and rainforest ecosystems on Sulawesi present during marine isotope stage 3 (MIS3) and the Holocene were interrupted by severe drying between ∼33,000 and 16,000 y B.P. when Northern Hemisphere ice sheets expanded and global temperatures cooled. Our record reveals little direct influence of precessional orbital forcing on regional climate, and the similarity between MIS3 and Holocene climates observed in Lake Towuti suggests that exposure of the Sunda Shelf has a weaker influence on regional hydroclimate and terrestrial ecosystems than suggested previously. We infer that hydrological variability in this part of Indonesia varies strongly in response to high-latitude climate forcing, likely through reorganizations of the monsoons and the position of the intertropical convergence zone. These findings suggest an important role for the tropical western Pacific in amplifying glacial-interglacial climate variability.tropical Pacific | paleoclimate | geochemistry | paleoecology

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Monsoon droughts, which often coincide with El Niño warm events, can have profound impacts on the populations of Southeast Asia. Improved understanding and prediction of such events can be aided by high‐resolution proxy climate records, but these are scarce for the tropics. Here we reconstruct the boreal autumn (October–November) Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) for Java, Indonesia (1787–1988). This reconstruction is based on nine ring‐width chronologies derived from living teak trees growing on the islands of Java and Sulawesi, and one coral δ18O series from Lombok. The PDSI reconstruction correlates significantly with El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO)‐related sea surface temperatures and other historical and instrumental records of tropical climate, reflecting the strong coupling between the climate of Indonesia and the large scale tropical Indo‐Pacific climate system.

The Last Glacial Maximum was cool and dry over the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool (IPWP), a key region driving global oceanic-atmospheric circulation. Both low-and high-latitude teleconnections with insolation, ice sheets, and sea level have been suggested to explain the pervasive aridity observed in paleoecological and geomorphic data. However, proxies tracking the Hand O-isotopic composition of rainfall (e.g., speleothems, sedimentary biomarkers) suggest muted aridity or even wetter conditions than the present, complicating interpretations of glacial IPWP climate. Here we use multiproxy reconstructions from lake sediments and modern rainfall isotopic measurements from central Indonesia to show that, contrary to the classical "amount effect," intensified Australian-Indonesian monsoon circulation drove lighter Hand Oisotopic composition of IPWP rainfall during the LGM, while at the same time, dry conditions prevailed. Precipitation isotopes are particularly sensitive to the apparent increase in monsoon circulation and perhaps also decreased moisture residence time implied by our data, explaining contrasts among proxy records while illuminating glacial IPWP atmospheric circulation, a key target for climate models.

Lake Towuti (2.5°S, 121.5°E) is a longlived, tectonic lake located on the Island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, and in the center of the Indo-Pacific warm pool (IPWP). Lake Towuti is connected with upstream lakes Matano and Mahalona through the Mahalona River, which constitutes the largest inlet to the lake. The Mahalona River Delta is prograding into Lake Towuti's deep northern basin thus exerting significant control on depositional processes in the basin. We combine high-resolution seismic reflection and sedimentological datasets from a 19.8-m-long sediment piston core from the distal edge of this delta to characterize fluctuations in deltaic sedimentation during the past *29 kyr BP and their relation to climatic change. Our datasets reveal that, in the present, sedimentation is strongly influenced by deposition of laterally transported sediments sourced from the Mahalona River Delta. Variations in the amount of laterally transported sediments, as expressed by coarse fraction amounts in pelagic muds and turbidite recurrence rates and cumulative thicknesses, are primarily a function of lake-level induced delta slope instability and delta progradation into the basin. We infer lowest lake-levels between *29 and 16, a gradual lake level rise between *16 and 11, and high lake-levels between *11 and 0 kyr BP. Periods of highest turbidite deposition, *26 to 24 and *18 to Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (16 kyr BP coincide with Heinrich events 2 and 1, respectively. Our lake-level reconstruction therefore supports previous observations based on geochemical hydroclimate proxies of a very dry last glacial and a wet Holocene in the region, and provides new evidence of millennial-scale variations in moisture balance in the IPWP.