Climate Change (Global and SE Asia)

Summary

We have developed millennial length reconstructions of regional hydroclimate using multiple collections of tree cores from throughout Southeast Asia. Several published records of seasonal hydroclimate from Vietnamese cypress represent the most robust and well-replicated tree ring records from the global tropics, and allow for detailed analyses of the regional hydroclimate for multiple seasons. We demonstrate zonal changes in the mean climate over the past millennium with strong linkages to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon and the equatorial Pacific Ocean, with a high degree of decadal scale variability. We are actively pursuing improvements in the metrics used for climate reconstruction through ecophysiological measurements from rare Southeast Asian conifer species, such as Blue Light Intensity as a proxy for lignin content, which is strongly correlated with seasonal rainfall. While tree rings yield annual to subannual resolution, recent development of speleothem records add greater temporal depth over the region. This information, taken collectively, can be used to explore ecosystems health across mainland Southeast Asia in the face of a warming climate, and to analyze the arc of human development under dynamical changes of the regional climate over the recent Holocene.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 18727