Recent Centennial Drought on the Tibetan Plateau is Outstanding Within the Past 3500 Years

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Date 2025 Feb 3

PMID 39900890

Authors

Yu Liu

Huiming Song

Zhisheng An

Qiang Li

Steven W Leavitt

Ulf Buntgen

Qiufang Cai

Ruoshi Liu

Congxi Fang

Changfeng Sun

Kerstin Treydte

Meng Ren

Lidong Mo

Yi Song

Wenju Cai

Quan Zhang

Weijian Zhou

Achim Brauning

Jussi Griessinger

Deliang Chen

Hans W Linderholm

Ashish Sinha

Hai Cheng

Lu Wang

Ying Lei

Junyan Sun

Wei Gong

Xuxiang Li

Linlin Cui

Liang Ning

Lingfeng Wan

Thomas W Crowther

Constantin M Zohner

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Given growing concerns about global climate change, it is critical to understand both historical and current shifts in the hydroclimate, particularly in regions critically entwined with global circulation. The Tibetan Plateau, the Earth's largest and highest plateau, is a nexus for global atmospheric processes, significantly influencing East Asian hydroclimate dynamics through the synergy of the Asian Monsoon and the Westerlies. Yet, understanding historical and recent hydroclimate fluctuations and their wide-ranging ecological and societal consequences remains challenging due to short instrumental observations and partly ambiguous proxy reconstructions. Here, we present a precisely-dated 3476-year precipitation reconstruction derived from tree-ring δO data on the Tibetan Plateau, representing one of the few multi-millennia-long annually-resolved terrestrial δO records to date. Our findings reveal that the 20 century drought extremes are severe within the past three millennia, and likely linked to the weakening of both the Asian Monsoon and Westerlies due to anthropogenic aerosol emissions. Additionally, our analyses identified three distinct stages (110 BC-AD 280, AD 330-770 and AD 950-1300) characterized by shifts toward arid hydroclimate conditions, corresponding to significant social unrest and dynasty collapses, which underscores the potential societal impacts of severe hydroclimatic shifts.

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