Project Details
Projekt
Indian rainfall variability in a warmer world: Unraveling the Miocene-Pliocene enigmatic onset and evolution of the Indian monsoon in unparalleled sedimentary archives from IODP Expedition 353
Applicant
Professor Dr. Wolfgang Kuhnt
Subject Area
Palaeontology
Term
from 2015 to 2017
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 280028059
Despite half a century of intense research, the processes that drive the short- and long-term variability of monsoonal precipitation within the Earths strongest hydrological regime are still a matter of intense debate. IODP expedition 353 (iMonsoon) targeted the reconstruction of the monsoonal precipitation signal through the Miocene to Pleistocene in its core geographic region of influence, the margins of the Bay of Bengal. The new cores retrieved from this critical region will allow to assess the relative sensitivity of the Indian Monsoon to insolation forcing and climate boundary conditions such as the extent of global ice volume and greenhouse gas concentrations, and the timing and conditions under which monsoonal circulation initiated and evolved. These new records will also be crucial to test the hypothesis of a close linkage between the climatic evolution of South Asia and the tectonic development of the Himalayans and the rising of the Tibetan Plateau. We propose to develop high-resolution temperature and salinity reconstructions (from paired stable isotopes and Mg/Ca) and monsoonal run off records (from XRF-scanning elemental data), focusing on the time intervals 16-14 Ma, 10-7 Ma and 5-3 Ma. The comparison of these crucial time windows will allow new insights into the linkages between monsoonal rainfall and high-latitude climate change during intervals of warmer climate with widely differing boundary conditions: (1) during the Miocene Climate Optimum (16-14.5 Ma), when Antarctic ice sheets behaved in a highly dynamic manner and the main uplift and expansion phase of the Tibetan plateau had not yet taken place, (2) between 10 and 7 Ma, when Earth was unipolarly glaciated and the main uplift and expansion phase of the Tibetan plateau occurred, and (3) between 5 to 3 Ma when northern hemisphere glaciation was initiated.
DFG Programme
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