The late Miocene through present paleoelevation history of southwestern Tibet

Saylor, Joel E.; Quade, Jay; Dettman, David L.; DeCelles, Peter G.; Kapp, Paul; Ding, Lin

doi:10.2475/01.2009.01

Cited by 154 publications

(165 citation statements)

References 85 publications

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“…One explanation for these changes is that at that time the surface of the plateau rose abruptly 1000 m or more [e.g., Harrison et al, 1992;Molnar et al, 1993], but much less than the full 5000 m present-day elevation of the plateau. Estimates of paleo-elevations of southern Tibet do not support, but rather contradict, this idea; essentially all such estimates show little change since 10 Ma to perhaps 25-35 Ma [Currie et al, 2005;DeCelles et al, 2007;Garzione et al, 2000aGarzione et al, , 2000bRowley and Currie, 2006;Rowley et al, 2001;Saylor et al, 2009;Spicer et al, 2003]. Because uncertainties in all arẽ 1000 m, however, let us consider the possibility that the average elevation of Tibet was 1000 m lower at 10-15 Ma than today.…”

Section: Discussion: Possible Relevance To Paleoclimatementioning

confidence: 88%

Signatures of Tibetan Plateau heating on Indian summer monsoon rainfall variability

Rajagopalan

Molnár

2013

JGR Atmospheres

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[1] Despite recent challenges, conventional wisdom has held that heating over the Tibetan Plateau leads to increased Indian summer monsoon rainfall via enhancement of cross-equatorial circulation aloft, and a concurrent strengthening of both the Somali Jet and westerly winds that bring moisture to southern India. We show that such heating, quantified by monthly estimates of moist static energy in the atmosphere just above the surface, correlates with summer monsoon rainfall, but only in the early (20 May to 15 June) and late (September 1 to 15 October) monsoon season. Correlations during the main monsoon season (15 June to 31 August) are small and insignificant. The positive correlations with early and late monsoon season, however, allow for heating over Tibet to modulate as much as 30% of the total rainfall. Furthermore, we demonstrate that heating over Tibet is independent of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, so that together they explain a substantial portion of variability in the early and late season rainfall, providing potential predictability. These links may also explain the wet conditions over India during early Holocene time and provide a quantitative link between a rise of Tibet and stronger Somali Jet.

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Section: Discussion: Possible Relevance To Paleoclimatementioning

confidence: 88%

Signatures of Tibetan Plateau heating on Indian summer monsoon rainfall variability

Rajagopalan

Molnár

2013

JGR Atmospheres

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“…Stable isotope analyses suggest that the Pliocene Zanda Basin was close to [30] or a few degrees warmer than [31] the present-day temperatures of 08C annual average. During the winters, temperatures were likely to be quite cold.…”

Section: Zoogeography and Palaeoenvironmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

From ‘third pole’ to north pole: a Himalayan origin for the arctic fox

Wang

Tseng

et al. 2014

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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The 'third pole' of the world is a fitting metaphor for the HimalayanTibetan Plateau, in allusion to its vast frozen terrain, rivalling the Arctic and Antarctic, at high altitude but low latitude. Living Tibetan and arctic mammals share adaptations to freezing temperatures such as long and thick winter fur in arctic muskox and Tibetan yak, and for carnivorans, a more predatory niche. Here, we report, to our knowledge, the first evolutionary link between an Early Pliocene (3.60-5.08 Myr ago) fox, Vulpes qiuzhudingi new species, from the Himalaya (Zanda Basin) and Kunlun Mountain (Kunlun Pass Basin) and the modern arctic fox Vulpes lagopus in the polar region. A highly hypercarnivorous dentition of the new fox bears a striking resemblance to that of V. lagopus and substantially predates the previous oldest records of the arctic fox by 3-4 Myr. The low latitude, high-altitude Tibetan Plateau is separated from the nearest modern arctic fox geographical range by at least 2000 km. The apparent connection between an ancestral high-elevation species and its modern polar descendant is consistent with our 'Out-of-Tibet' hypothesis postulating that high-altitude Tibet was a training ground for cold-environment adaptations well before the start of the Ice Age.

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“…Thus, we can reasonably expect that fl oral and faunal communities on the Tibetan Plateau would also have responded to global climate change. The shift from C 3 -dominated forests to mixed C 3 and C 4 or C 4 -dominated grasslands observed in the Zhada basin (Zhang et al, 1981;Zhu et al, 2006Zhu et al, , 2007Yu et al, 2007;Saylor et al, 2009) was not the result of basin uplift, because an identical change is observed in low-elevation deposits in nearby northern India. Further, analysis of oxygen isotopes from aquatic gastropod shells from the Zhada Formation indicates a probable decrease in elevation of the basin since the Late Miocene .…”

Section: Global Climate Change and Its Impact On The Southern Tibetanmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Wang et al, 2008a). In contrast, other lines of evidence indicate that the southern Tibetan Plateau has been at high elevations since at least the Middle Miocene (Garzione et al, 2000a;Rowley et al, 2001;Spicer et al, 2003;Currie et al, 2005;Saylor et al, 2009) and central Tibetan Plateau since at least the Oligocene (Cyr et al, 2005;Graham et al, 2005;Rowley and Currie, 2006;DeCelles et al, 2007;Dupont-Nivet et al, 2008). These paleoelevation studies also show that uplift predated widespread Late Miocene climate change (see Molnar, 2005, for a summary of evidence for Late Miocene climate change).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

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Climate-driven environmental change in the Zhada basin, southwestern Tibetan Plateau

Saylor

2010

Geosphere

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The Zhada basin is a large Neogene extensional sag basin in the Tethyan Himalaya of southwestern Tibet. In this paper we examine environmental changes in the Zhada basin using sequence stratigraphy, isotope stratigraphy, and lithostratigraphy. Sequence stratigraphy reveals a long-term tectonic signal in the formation and fi lling of the Zhada basin, as well as higher-frequency cycles, which we attribute to Milankovitch forcing. The record of Milankovitch cycles in the Zhada basin implies that global climate drove lake and wetland expansion and contraction in the southern Tibetan Plateau from the Late Miocene to the Pleistocene. Sequence stratigraphy shows that the Zhada basin evolved from an overfi lled to underfi lled basin, but continued evolution was truncated by an abrupt return to fl uvial conditions. Isotope stratigraphy shows distinct drying cycles, particularly during times when the basin was underfi lled.A long-term environmental change observed in the Zhada basin involves a decrease in abundance of arboreal pollen in favor of nonarboreal pollen. The similarity between the long-term environmental changes in the Zhada basin and those observed elsewhere on and around the Tibetan Plateau suggests that those changes are due to global or regional climate change rather than solely the result of uplift of the Tibetan Plateau.

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The late Miocene through present paleoelevation history of southwestern Tibet

Cited by 154 publications

References 85 publications

Signatures of Tibetan Plateau heating on Indian summer monsoon rainfall variability

Signatures of Tibetan Plateau heating on Indian summer monsoon rainfall variability

From ‘third pole’ to north pole: a Himalayan origin for the arctic fox

Climate-driven environmental change in the Zhada basin, southwestern Tibetan Plateau

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