Sedimentary documents and Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating for formation of the present landform of the northern Ulan Buh Desert, northern China

Chinese deserts and sand fields in Last Glacial Maximum and Holocene Optimum

“…The deserts and sand fields have changed greatly in time and space during late Quaternary, and to reconstruct spatial changes in extent of active dunes is particular important [2][3][4][5][6]. There were a few reconstructions of desert changes during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and Holocene Optimum (HO) [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26], however, because of limited dating work and field investigation, the results need tested. Moreover, some previous reconstructions were speculation based on comparison with paleoclimatic records, without direct and specific stratigraphic evidence; therefore, the conclusions [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] should be clarified.…”

“…There were a few reconstructions of desert changes during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and Holocene Optimum (HO) [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26], however, because of limited dating work and field investigation, the results need tested. Moreover, some previous reconstructions were speculation based on comparison with paleoclimatic records, without direct and specific stratigraphic evidence; therefore, the conclusions [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] should be clarified. In China, some early investigations have advanced our knowledge of environment changes in the desert and sand fields, but there were quite a few issues that were not well resolved in this previous research, including: (1) Because of the limitation of dating techniques, accurate, independent high-quality ages for the deserts and sand fields were limited in number; previous research always compared the sand deposition with established time series such as that of Chinese loesspaleosol sequence and marine oxygen isotope stages to obtain age control [9,…”

“…Moreover, some previous reconstructions were speculation based on comparison with paleoclimatic records, without direct and specific stratigraphic evidence; therefore, the conclusions [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] should be clarified. In China, some early investigations have advanced our knowledge of environment changes in the desert and sand fields, but there were quite a few issues that were not well resolved in this previous research, including: (1) Because of the limitation of dating techniques, accurate, independent high-quality ages for the deserts and sand fields were limited in number; previous research always compared the sand deposition with established time series such as that of Chinese loesspaleosol sequence and marine oxygen isotope stages to obtain age control [9,10,[15][16][17][21][22][23][24][25][26] which was quite speculative. (2) The ages were not well-distributed spatially across the deserts and sand fields.…”

Environmental changes in the Ulan Buh Desert, southern Inner Mongolia, China since the middle Pleistocene based on sedimentology, chronology and proxy indexes

“…During the last 2000 yr the eastern UBD lowlands were converted first to farmland then to desert by poor land management at the end of the Han Dynasty (~200 AD) (Hou and Yu, 1973). Wind-blown sand, derived from the Badain Jaran Desert, formed a dune belt in the western UBD during the last 2000 yr Fan et al, 2010a) (Table 1). In the Hobq Desert, at around 2 ka, the present desert landscape started to develop rapidly in the Hobq area.…”

“…Still others argued that the northern UBD to have formed during and after the Han Dynasty (200 BC) as the result of human activity (e.g. farming and overgrazing) (Hou and Yu, 1973;Fan et al, 2010a). These studies have explored episodes of desert formation at different time scales and have focused on the northern UBD.…”