Holocene vegetation and climate change in Central Ganga Plain: A study based on multiproxy records from Chaudhary-Ka-Tal, Raebareli District, Uttar Pradesh, India

Holocene climate variability and cultural dynamics in the Indian subcontinent

“…Benital Lake (Bhushan et al, 2018); 3. Chaudhary ka Tal (Saxena et al, 2015); 4. Dindwana Lake (Wasson et al, 1984); 5.…”

“…The paleoclimate record from the continental Oman (Fleitmann et al, 2007), Arabian Sea (Gupta et al, 2005), Bay of Bengal (Ponton et al, 2012;Contreras-Rosales et al, 2014) and southern India (Sandeep et al, 2017) demonstrated progressively decreasing monsoon intensity during the mid-Holocene in response to solar variability. However, the pollen-based records from the Gangetic plains and paleo-records from NW India show fluctuating precipitation condition, probably due to a variable moisture source and proxy sensitivities (Prasad and Enzel, 2006;Saxena et al, 2013Saxena et al, , 2015Saxena and Trivedi, 2017) (Figure 2). 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).…”

“…Additionally, based on the multiproxy data from mudflat sediments from Diu (western India), Banerji et al, (2017) suggested that the climate in western India was warm and humid during 3.2 and 2.6 kyr BP followed by aridity until 1.9 kyr BP and further reoccurrence of wet phase from 1.9 to 0.35 kyr BP (AD 50 to AD 1600), which is in line with the global RWP and MWP events. The paleo-record from the Gangetic plains shows a continuous decreasing trend of monsoon intensity punctuated with several small-scale warm periods which correspond to the MWP (Saxena et al, 2015) (Figure 2). However, the climate record from southern India and central India shows contrasting behavior during MWP and LIA with paleo-records from the Gangetic plains.…”

Recent Contributions in the Field of Sediment Geochemistry

“…We document here important research work on unconsolidated sediment deposits of the Quaternary period,where the geochemical proxy is an important proxy among others in the paleoclimate study. Studies in this regard include lake deposits of the Himalaya (Choudhary et al, 2013;Srivastava et al, 2013;Kotlia et al, 2010;Agrawal et al, 2015;Das et al, 2010), the Ganga plain (Saxena et al, 2015) and the peninsular region (Chauhan et al, 2013a;Chauhan et al, 2013b;Prasad et al, 2014;Raj et al 2015). Studies on fluvial deposits of the Narmada valley (Sridhar et al, 2015) and Cauvery delta in the peninsular region have also yielded good results.…”

“…4050 BP). Saxena et al (2015) studied a 2.1 m thick sediment profile from Chaudhary-Ka-Tal (lake) of Raebareli District using organic/inorganic carbon analyses along with pollen and sediment texture data. They have suggested that around 8470 to 6422 cal year BP grasslands with interspersed forest groves thrived in the region under a warmer and moderately humid climate than today and further similar scenario existed ~3150 to 1110 cal BP.…”