High-resolution millennial and centennial scale Holocene monsoon variability in the Higher Central Himalayas

Palynological Evidence of Late Holocene Paleo‐Monsoon in Eastern Pamir

“…However, a relatively humid climate with the occurrence of Tsuga pollen during 3,200–2,800 cal years B.P. (Figure ; Pollen zone I) corresponds to a relatively strong monsoon in north India at the time (Banerji et al, ; Bhushan et al, ). Despite a weakening trend, the Indian monsoon remained active during the late Holocene (Rawat et al, ; Zhao et al, ), occasionally resulting in the transport of both moisture and Tsuga pollen to the study area.…”

Holocene climate variability and cultural dynamics in the Indian subcontinent

“…The geographically uneven cultural development across the subcontinent eventually led to the regionalization of specific cultures with marked geographic boundaries, some contemporary with each (Rawat et al, 2015); 2. Benital Lake (Bhushan et al, 2018); 3. Chaudhary ka Tal (Saxena et al, 2015); 4.…”

“…In the Gangetic plain, during the transition phase between early and mid-Holocene, several mature cultural sites have been reported (e.g., Lahuradewa, Senuwar), indicating the close relationship between climate and human activity ( Figure 2) (Saxena et al, 2013). Also, the paleoclimate datasets from the northwestern Himalaya demonstrate extreme monsoon precipitation during the early Holocene in response to changes in the solar insolation (Wünnemann et al, 2010;Srivastava et al, 2013;Leipe et al, 2014;Mishra et al, 2015;Rawat et al, 2015;Bhushan et al, 2018) (Figure 2). The fluvial records from the NW Himalayan region corroborates high fluvial incision during the early Holocene with SW monsoon penetrated deep into the orographic barrier of the Himalaya (Bookhagen and Burbank, 2006;Phartiyal et al, 2009).…”

“…In central India, the δ 18 O record from Kotumsar cave indicates several small periods of enhanced monsoonal precipitation punctuated by a series of megadroughts during the mid-Holocene linked to the weaker North Atlantic circulation (Band et al, 2018) and higher frequency of El Niño events as evident from the El-Junco grains size records (Overpeck et al, 1996;Conroy et al, 2008;Band et al, 2018). Furthermore, in the NW Himalaya, due to the interaction between the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) and the westerlies, a complex climate dynamics has been observed in several terrestrial records (Demske et al, 2009;Leipe et al, 2014;Rawat et al, 2015;Bali et al, 2016;Srivastava et al, 2017;Bhushan et al, 2018) (Figure 2). These records show that even in the envelope of the declining phase of monsoon intensity, some of the climate records show a second peak of intensification during the mid-Holocene (Demske et al, 2009;Anoop et al, 2013b) (Figure 2).…”

Late Quaternary Palaeoclimate and Contemporary Moisture Source to Extreme NW India: A Review on Present Understanding and Future Perspectives

“…Studies based on sedimentary archives, which include glacial (Fort, 1983;Dainelli, 1922;Kuhle, 1998;Owen et al, 2006;Achenbach, 2010), fluvial (Sharma et al, 1998;Shi et al, 2001;Dortch et al, 2011;Sangode et al, 2011;Scherler et al, 2014;Nag and Phartiyal, 2015), lacustrine (Gasse et al, 1996;Shi et al, 2001;Wünnemann et al, 2010;Phartiyal et al, 2013Phartiyal et al, , 2015 and aeolian (Kumar et al, 2017) deposits, significant work has been carried out. Climate proxies that include biotic proxies mainly pollen-spore based studies (Bhattacharyya, 1989;Demske et al, 2009;Wünnemann et al, 2010) and various abiotic proxies (Fort et al, 1989;Gasse and Van Campo, 1994;Fontes et al, 1996;Bhushan et al, 2018) were employed to retrieve palaeoclimatic signals preserved in the sediments. Besides, several chronological techniques such as conventional and accelerated mass spectrometry (AMS) carbon radiometric dating (Phartiyal et al, 2005(Phartiyal et al, , 2013, optical luminescence dating (OSL) (Dortch et al, 2010(Dortch et al, , 2013Blöthe et al, 2014) and cosmogenic radionuclide dating (Brown et al, 2002;Dortch et al, 2010Dortch et al, , 2013Blöthe et al, 2014) have also been applied.…”