Asian-Pacific Paleoclimatic Perspectives on New Studies of Stratigraphy, Sedimentology, and Geochemistry with Global Implications

• Submission deadline: 30 April 2022
• Lead Editor: Min-Te Chen, National Taiwan Ocean University, Taiwan
• Guest Editors:
  • Hema Achyuthan, Anna University Chennai, India
  • Deming Kong, Guangdong Ocean University, China
  • Yoshimi Kuubota, National Museum of Nature and Science, Japan
  • Shengfa Liu, First Institute of Oceanography, China

Call for papers

Description

The Asian-Pacific region hosts a fifth of the world’s population. The security of Asian-Pacific countries relies heavily on a predictable climate that brings, for example, monsoonal precipitation for residential, agricultural, and industrial purposes. As evidenced by the recent increased frequency of typhoons, flooding/droughts, and heat/cold surges, the extreme climate has impacted our living environment and even national security in this region.

The predictability of the Asian-Pacific climate is mainly based on our deep understanding of how key climatic drivers, such as greenhouse gases, insolation, the cryosphere, and volcanism, interact with atmospheric and ocean circulations. Disentangling how the complex climatic drivers have interacted in the present and past in the Asian-Pacific region remains a challenge. In particular, it has been noticed that the present climate is quickly evolving due to the increased anthropogenic forcing since 1950 AD. This trend poses an urgent need to extend our instrumental climate observations that only cover a few millennia to the scale of millions of years to elucidate climate records that cover the full spectra of natural climate dynamics. Studying the archives of past climate from marine and continental sediments offers a unique opportunity to reconstruct deep-time climate changes from orbital (105 years) to centennial (103 years) scales and better understand these complex mechanisms.

In this Special Issue, we aim to attract a set of high-quality papers that present and interpret data from new studies of stratigraphy, sedimentology, geochemistry, and any new paleoclimatic proxies in the Asian and Pacific region based on natural climate archives of marine and continental sediments of the past few million years (e.g., IODP, IMAGES, ICDP). This Issue also welcomes sediment core studies that show complex interactions between the lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere with implications for past climate dynamics. Review articles and original research contributions that provide an overview of past climate during these time scales will also be welcomed.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following (particularly in Asian continents and the Indo-Pacific Ocean):

• Stable isotope and radiogenic-dated stratigraphy and chronology
• Microfossils and their paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental interpretations
• Climate processes governed by sediment dynamics
• Mineral and geochemical indicators of past climate history
• Inorganic and organic proxies applied in long-term climate reconstructions
• Reconstruction of tectonic events (tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions etc.) using marine or terrestrial deposits, and its impact on the regional climate/ocean environment
• Paleoclimatic studies of past extreme climates (e.g. typhoons, flooding, and cold surges)
• Proxy development/improvement and related sedimentary processes (e.g., diagenesis, dissolution, etc.)
• Interactions between regional climate/ocean systems (monsoon systems, Kuroshio/Oyashio, deep, intermediate waters), and its relationship to global climate dynamics
• Long-term or abrupt changes in geographic configuration due to sea level, local tectonic events, etc., and its impact on regional climate/ocean systems
• Ocean/sedimentary changes including the ocean surface and floor, sediment/water interface, sediment interior and its impact on marine ecosystems
• New progress on paleoclimatic studies relevant to recent IODP and ICDP drilling
• Climate history its relationship with human evolution, culture, and socioeconomic changes

Papers are published upon acceptance.