Abstract
To provide a long-term context for understanding the “Karakoram Anomaly” in recent glacier studies, we originally aimed to develop an annually resolved multi-century winter–spring precipitation record using tree-ring earlywood cellulose δ18O (δ18OEW) of Pinus wallachina from the Karakoram, northern Pakistan. Out of expectation, winter (January–May) temperature rather than precipitation is found to be the dominant climate signal (r = 0.63, p < 0.01, 1955–2013) stored in the δ18OEW chronology. Precipitation signals mainly appear at high-frequency variations, but weaker than temperature signal. We reconstructed January–May temperature back to 1631 with an explained variance of 39.7 % during the calibration period of 1955–2013. The reconstruction reveals that the Little Ice Age (LIA) was 0.94 °C warmer during 1647–1746 than the twentieth century (1900–1999). These warmer conditions are additionally validated by ice-core δ18O data from the Kunlun Mountains of High Asia and the northern North America. The eastward Polar Vortex and enhanced mid-latitude Westerlies on the Euro-Asia continent may be a possible explanation of a spatial coherency of LIA temperature between the Karakoram and the northern North America. Although not the original aim of this study, we provide evidence that the attribution of anomalous behavior of Karakoram glaciers in a long-term context may be misled when using precipitation reconstructions derived from tree-ring oxygen isotope.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 42007407, 41571201, 41661144040, 41771240, 41661144025), CAS Special Project on International Cooperation along the Belt and Road Initiative (No. 131C11KYSB20160061), West Light Foundation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to Haifeng Zhu, and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation to Ru Huang (No. 2019M660814). Tree-ring isotope and winter-spring reconstruction data in the present study will be deposited at National Tibetan Plateau Data Center. A special acknowledgement was expressed to China-Pakistan Joint Research Center on Earth Sciences that supported the implementation of this study. The R code to reproduce the figures will be available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author (zhuhf@itpcas.ac.cn). We are grateful to Iris Burchardt, Roswitha Höfner-Stich (Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany) for support and help during isotope analyses. We also deeply appreciate Lonnie G. Thompson (The Ohio State University, USA), Jan Esper (Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany) and Feng Chen (Yunnan University, China) for kindly sharing their data.
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Zhu, H., Huang, R., Asad, F. et al. Unexpected climate variability inferred from a 380-year tree-ring earlywood oxygen isotope record in the Karakoram, Northern Pakistan. Clim Dyn 57, 701–715 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05736-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05736-6