Regional environmental differentiation in China since the mid-pleistocene inferred from lake records and its relation with east Asian monsoons

Comparative study of long lake records in different regions in China can provide some significant information about the regional differentiation of the environment and Asian monsoon activities. However. intensively studied lacustrine cores with a span of a few hundred thousand years are very rare in China. The available examples are only three long cores from the Zoige basin in the eastern Qinghai-Tibet plateau, the Qaidam basin in the northern Qinghai-Tibet plateau and the Dianchi basin in the Yunnan plateau respectively. The results show that the regional environmental differentiation since the Mid-Pleistocene involved three stages, ie. 780-480, 480-160, 160-0 ka B.P. In each of the three stages different regions of China had their own distinctive environmental characteristics, indicating that the uplift of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau played a major role in the environmental differentiation process.