Tropical rain shift 600 years ago
Nature Geoscience
2009년6월29일

During the Little Ice Age, the Pacific section of the circumglobal tropical rainbelt was up to 500 km south of its present position. Published online in this week's Nature Geoscience, these results indicate a very sensitive response of tropical rainfall patterns ― which many people in Africa, Asia and South America rely on for subsistence agriculture ― to small changes in Earth's radiation budget.
Julian Sachs and colleagues use microbiological, molecular and isotopic analyses of lake sediments from three islands in the eastern, central and western equatorial Pacific Ocean, respectively, to determine wet and dry periods on each island. The periods of humidity they identify in the three locations suggest that the intertropical convergence zone ― which marks the position of the most vigorous rainfall events ― were substantially further south than today between about ad 1400 and 1850. At this time, European temperatures were relatively cool, possibly owing to low solar radiation.
doi: 10.1038/ngeo554
리서치 하이라이트
-
3월4일
Environment: Reservoirs account for more than half of water storage variabilityNature
-
3월2일
Evolution: Neanderthals may have heard just like usNature Ecology & Evolution
-
3월2일
Geoscience: Earth’s atmosphere may return to low-levels of oxygen in one billion yearsNature Geoscience
-
2월26일
Environment: Shifting from small to medium plastic bottles could reduce PET wasteScientific Reports
-
2월24일
Environment: European forests more vulnerable to multiple threats as climate warmsNature Communications
-
2월11일
Environment: Global CFC-11 emissions in declineNature