CENTURY-SCALE EVENTS IN MONSOONAL CLIMATE OVER THE PAST 24,000 YEARS

BOTH the marine sediment record and numerical modelling of the atmospheric summer circulation over the northern Indian Ocean and southeast Asia have shown that the monsoonal climate exhibits a direct but nonlinear response to the intensity of solar insolation during summer, with a time lag of several thousand years1,2. Here we present evidence from a high-resolution record of oxygen isotopes and carbonate spanning the past 24,000 calendar years that the response of the southwest monsoon over the Arabian Sea to long-term, gradual insolation changes occurred in several distinct events of less than 300 years duration, at 14,300, 13,500, 13,060, 9,900, 8,800 and 7,300 C-14 yr BP. Thus, during this transitional period from glacial to post-glacial conditions the slow solar forcing seems to have induced very rapid changes in local climate. We speculate that the rapid response may be related to albedo changes in Asia.