Magnetic Proxy of Eurasian Loess Revealing Enhanced Physical Erosion Since the Mid‐Pleistocene Transition

Abstract

Thick eolian sediments in Eurasia, mainly distributed in the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP), Central Asia and Europe, have long been intensively investigated as important and valuable terrestrial Quaternary paleoclimate and paleoenvironment media (Kukla, 1975;T. Liu, 1985;Dodonov, 1991;Forster & Heller, 1994). Over the past three decades, eolian loess deposits in these areas were widely used to explore the evolution of westerly and East Asian monsoons and the aridification of Asian inland (An, 2000;Fang et al., 2020;Guo et al., 2002), due to their continuous deposition, long timespan and high resolution. In fact, in addition to paleoclimate reconstruction, eolian loess deposits also contain physical erosion information of dust source regions. Continental erosion processes could modify the surface topography and the clastic materials in dust source regions (Haeuselmann et al., 2007), thereby exerting an important influence on the geochemical and mineralogical composition of loess deposits.