Seminar

Ever since “global warming” was projected, the world public has been paying growing attention to its widespread impacts on human and natural systems. The “global warming controversy”, however, concerns the debates over whether global warming is true, whether it is caused primarily by human-induced greenhouse gases or the natural forcing factors; and whether such warming periods have occurred before, etc.

The vast region of arid Asian inland, where evaporation strongly affects the fragile ecosystem and hydrological balance, serves as an ideal place to study the “natural background information” of climate changes since the late Pleistocene. This seminar presents the multi-proxy-based hydrological records from lakes across the forest-steppe ecotone in south Western Siberia and steppe-desert ecotone in northwestern (NW) China since the late Pleistocene, emphasizing the hydrological evolution of Westerly-dominated regions, potential forcing factors, and interactions between Westerlies and East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM).