A 850-year record climate and vegetation changes in East Siberia (Russia), inferred from geochemical and biological proxies of lake sediments

Abstract

East Siberia is very sensitive to moisture regimes because it is located in a margin area, where moisture from the North Atlantic is strongly depleted, and the penetration of the East Asian monsoon is weak and rare. In winter months, the Siberian anticyclone strongly blocks and reduces the external influences on the region. The high latitude of the study area at 52°N is probably sensitive to variation in insolation and solar activity. We analysed a 42-cm-long sediment record from Lake Mountain located in East Siberia (Russia) for geochemical, mineralogical, subfossil diatoms, chironomids, and pollen to provide a reconstruction of the climate history of the area for the last 850 years. According to our reconstruction, a clear decrease in summer temperatures occurred in East Siberia after ca. 1400 and we linked this temperature drop with the beginning of the Little Ice Age. The coldest summer occurred about ca. 1570-1700 and 1830-1900. We assumed that the most significant changes of the lake bio-productivity and the catchment area were occurred about ca.

Regional climate changes in the south part of East Siberia for the last 4.5 ka (Lake Frolikha, Northern Baikal area, Russia)

“…These diatoms are known in oligotrophic lakes of Siberia, Mongolia, North America, Europe and Miocene-Holocene (Genkal et al, 2011). Currently, the diatom species often occur in the mountain lakes around Lake Baikal (Fedotov et al, 2015;Vorobyeva et al, 2015). In general, we assume that climate was most likely warm and humid in this part of Eurasia at 4.5-3.5 ka BP.…”

The Current Oxygen and Hydrogen Isotopic Status of Lake Baikal

“…According to many reconstructions of global surface temperatures for the Northern Hemisphere, a transition from the Little Ice Age to the Recent Warming was characterized by a sharp increase in the annual temperature that occurred ca. 1850 to 1860 [28][29][30]. However, records from East Siberia revealed that significant changes in climate parameters, vegetation, and lake bio-productivity were not intense until 1900 [30].…”

The impacts of intensive mining on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems: A case of sediment pollution and calcium decline in cool temperate Tasmania, Australia

“…Molybdenum Incoherent/coherent ratio (Inc/coh) approximates the average matrix composition of atomic numbers and was used to estimate organic matter content in sediment archives (Croudace and Rothwell, 2015;Field et al, 2018;Woodward and Gadd, 2019;Woodward et al, 2018). Br was used as another indicator for organic rich sediments (Croudace and Rothwell, 2015;Fedotov et al, 2015;Ziegler et al, 2008).…”