Hongshan jade
Posted on 01/12/2015 2:11:03 AM PST by SunkenCiv
It had been thought that the deserts in northern China are one million years old, but a new study of the Hunshandake Sandy Lands of Inner Mongolia suggests that its desert is only 4,000 years old. Xiaoping Yang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Louis Scuderi of the University of New Mexico, and their colleagues examined the patterns of dunes and depressions in the region and lake sediments, and they dated quartz from the region with a technique known as optically stimulated luminescence.
They found that Hunshandake had deep lakes and rivers beginning some 12,000 years ago.
"We're amazed by how much water there was back then. There were very, very large lakes, and grasslands and forests. And based on all the artifacts we've found out there, there was clearly a very large population along the lake shores," Scuderi told Live Science. Then some 4,200 years ago, the region rapidly dried out during a major, worldwide climatic shift that caused droughts throughout the northern hemisphere.
These changes may have pushed the people of the Hongshan culture out of the remote north and into the rest of China. "An important possible line of research in the future is to figure out how important the Hongshan culture was to the development of later Chinese culture," Scuderi explained. In fact, some of the earliest jade artifacts in the country are from Hongshan sites, yet the cradle of Chinese civilization has usually been placed in the Yellow River basin. To read about how climate change is impacting archaeological sites today, see "Climate Change: Sites in Peril."
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
Hongshan jade
Groundwater sapping as the cause of irreversible desertification of Hunshandake Sandy Lands, Inner Mongolia, northern China.
Yang X1, Scuderi LA2, Wang X3, Scuderi LJ4, Zhang D5, Li H5, Forman S6, Xu Q7, Wang R8, Huang W9, Yang S9.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Jan 5. pii: 201418090.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25561539
Abstract
In the middle-to-late Holocene, Earth’s monsoonal regions experienced catastrophic precipitation decreases that produced green to desert state shifts. Resulting hydrologic regime change negatively impacted water availability and Neolithic cultures. Whereas mid-Holocene drying is commonly attributed to slow insolation reduction and subsequent nonlinear vegetation-atmosphere feedbacks that produce threshold conditions, evidence of trigger events initiating state switching has remained elusive. Here we document a threshold event ca. 4,200 years ago in the Hunshandake Sandy Lands of Inner Mongolia, northern China, associated with groundwater capture by the Xilamulun River. This process initiated a sudden and irreversible region-wide hydrologic event that exacerbated the desertification of the Hunshandake, resulting in post-Humid Period mass migration of northern China’s Neolithic cultures. The Hunshandake remains arid and is unlikely, even with massive rehabilitation efforts, to revert back to green conditions.
Geochemical-geomorphological Evidence for the Provenance of Aeolian Sands and Sedimentary Environments in the Hunshandake Sandy Land, Eastern Inner Mongolia, China
Ziting, L. and Xiaoping, Y. (2013)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1755-6724.12095/abstract
The old view:
> Hunshandake Sandy Land locates in the central part of Inner Mongolia china. It is one of ten largest sandy lands in china and has exited for more than 220,000 thousand [sic] years. It is the nearest sandy land to Beijing City. Occupying an area of 52,000 square kilometers, with an average elevation of 1,100 meters, it is a famous desert in China.
http://www.at0086.com/Hunshandake/
12k years ago, an ice sheet not far from there was melting..
No surprise there.
No more ice melt, lakes eventually dry up.
And still more research will show that, typical of China, it has been the same damn year repeated 4,000 times.
Nope. It was going along nicely for nearly 8,000 years, when...
> Here we document a threshold event ca. 4,200 years ago in the Hunshandake Sandy Lands of Inner Mongolia, northern China, associated with groundwater capture by the Xilamulun River.
:’)
One man's "massive rehabilitation" is another man's "massive pollution". Who's to say that deserts need rehabilitation, while grasslands don't? 4200 before present is no more the prefect climate date for Hunshandake than 1978 is for Minnesota. If you look at the geologic record, we should be "rehabilitating" Minnesota so that it has a mile thick ice cover, since that's been it's dominant climate over the past million years, or so.
NOTHING to do with man-made climate change.
I guess we should flood the Great Plains since it was an ocean. What BS...
Evolution in Your FaceLake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, is home to more than 300 species of cichlids. These fish, which are popular in aquariums, are deep-bodied and have one nostril, rather than the usual two, on each side of the head. Seismic profiles and cores of the lake taken by a team headed by Thomas C. Johnson of the University of Minnesota, reveal that the lake dried up completely about 12,400 years ago. This means that the rate of speciation of cichlid fishes has been extremely rapid: something on average of one new species every 40 years!
by Patrick Huyghe
Omni
Whatever is useful for humans is rehabilitation. :’) I think the main reason for the results of this study is to keep the Chicoms from trying to refoliate a marginal area.
Dammm those Mongolian Bush-men for not signing Kyoto!
Perhaps they needed a Gobi Tween.
2104 BC – 2103 BC: Date of the Biblical flood according to the Hebrew Calendar.
The 4.2 kiloyear BP aridification event was one of the most severe climatic events of the Holocene period in terms of impact on cultural upheaval. Starting in ~2200 BC, it probably lasted the entire 22nd century BC. It is very likely to have caused the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt as well as the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia. The drought may have also initiated southeastward habitat tracking within the Indus Valley Civilization.
The trigger for this climate disaster was methane from Bactrian camel farts.
The earth really doesn’t give a shit what the gnats living on its surface do. 10,000 years ago the land on which New York City sits was under the mile-thick Laurentide ice sheet and, in 10 to 15 thousand years from now, that same ice sheet will waltz out of Canada and bulldoze that city into the sea.
Not unlike Death Valley, CA.
It is a shame that to get funding for interesting work like this the profs have to find some connection to "climate change."
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