-
Chapter
Catchment and Depositional Studies for the Reconstruction of Past Environmental Change in Southern Africa
Terrestrial signals in marine sedimentary archives are often used for reconstructing past environments, vegetation and climate, as well as for determining sediment fluxes, pathways, and depositional sites and ...
-
Article
Open AccessIsotopic and magnetic proxies are good indicators of millennial-scale variability of the East Asian monsoon
Past East Asian Monsoon variability has been reconstructed using oxygen isotopes of cave speleothems as well as proxy indicators from Chinese loess sequences. However, where the speleothem record is dominated ...
-
Article
Open AccessMicroscopic charcoals in ocean sediments off Africa track past fire intensity from the continent
Fires in Africa account for more than half of global fire-carbon emissions but the long-term evolution of fire activity and its link to global climate change remains elusive. Paleofire records provide descript...
-
Article
Open AccessLast deglacial abrupt climate changes caused by meltwater pulses in the Labrador Sea
Freshwater perturbations are often thought to be associated with abrupt climate changes during the last deglaciation, while many uncertainties remain regarding the exact timing, pathway, mechanism, and influen...
-
Article
Open AccessPublisher Correction: Hydroclimatic vulnerability of peat carbon in the central Congo Basin
-
Article
Open AccessHydroclimatic vulnerability of peat carbon in the central Congo Basin
The forested swamps of the central Congo Basin store approximately 30 billion metric tonnes of carbon in peat1,2. Little is known about the vulnerability of these carbon stocks. Here we investigate this vulnerabi...
-
Article
Multiple drivers of Miocene C4 ecosystem expansions
-
Article
Open AccessTropical South Atlantic influence on Northeastern Brazil precipitation and ITCZ displacement during the past 2300 years
Recent paleoclimatic studies suggest that changes in the tropical rainbelt across the Atlantic Ocean during the past two millennia are linked to a latitudinal shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ)...
-
Article
Publisher Correction: Global-scale evidence for the refractory nature of riverine black carbon
In the version of this Article originally published, the units of the x and y axes in Fig. 3a were incorrectly given as ‘mg km–2 yr–1’; the correct units are ‘Mg km–2 yr–1’. These errors have now been corrected i...
-
Article
A two-million-year-long hydroclimatic context for hominin evolution in southeastern Africa
The past two million years of eastern African climate variability is currently poorly constrained, despite interest in understanding its assumed role in early human evolution1–4. Rare palaeoclimate records from n...
-
Article
Global-scale evidence for the refractory nature of riverine black carbon
Wildfires and incomplete combustion of fossil fuel produce large amounts of black carbon. Black carbon production and transport are essential components of the carbon cycle. Constraining estimates of black car...
-
Article
Open AccessRapid termination of the African Humid Period triggered by northern high-latitude cooling
The rapidity and synchrony of the African Humid Period (AHP) termination at around 5.5 ka are debated, and it is unclear what caused a rapid hydroclimate response. Here we analysed the hydrogen isotopic compos...
-
Article
Open AccessLate Holocene slowdown of the Indian Ocean Walker circulation
Changes in tropical zonal atmospheric (Walker) circulation induce shifts in rainfall patterns along with devastating floods and severe droughts that dramatically impact the lives of millions of people. Histori...
-
Article
Hydrologic control of carbon cycling and aged carbon discharge in the Congo River basin
Rivers transport terrestrial organic carbon. Ancient molecular markers of methanogens and radiocarbon data from offshore sediments suggest that much of this carbon in the Congo River is aged, and that hydrolog...
-
Chapter
North-West African Hydrologic Changes in the Holocene: A Combined Isotopic Data and Model Approach
To achieve a better understanding of the hydrologic evolution of the North-West (NW) African monsoon system during the Holocene, in particular during inferred abrupt climate changes at the end of the African H...
-
Article
The role of fire in Miocene to Pliocene C4 grassland and ecosystem evolution
Modern grasslands are dominated by grasses that use the C4 photosynthetic pathway, and were established about 8 million years ago. A sediment record suggests that in southwestern Africa, the expansion of grasslan...
-
Article
Forcing of wet phases in southeast Africa over the past 17,000 years
A continuous record of hydrologic variability for the past 17,000 years at the mouth of the Zambezi River shows that hydrologic conditions in southeast Africa were controlled by variations in local insolation ...
-
Article
Interhemispheric symmetry of the tropical African rainbelt over the past 23,000 years
The tropical African rainbelt is an important component of atmospheric circulation and the global hydrological cycle. Reconstructions of vegetation in tropical Africa over the past 23,000 years suggest that th...
-
Article
Climatic controls on central African hydrology during the past 20,000 years
Past hydrological changes in Africa have been linked to various climatic processes, depending on region and timescale. Long-term precipitation changes in the regions of northern and southern Africa influenced ...
-
Article
African vegetation controlled by tropical sea surface temperatures in the mid-Pleistocene period
The dominant forcing factors for past large-scale changes in vegetation are widely debated. Changes in the distribution of C4 plants—adapted to warm, dry conditions and low atmospheric CO2 concentrations1—have be...
