Monsoon-driven Saharan dust variability over the past 240,000 years

Saharan dust emissions over the past 240,000 years vary primarily with summer insolation rather than glacial-interglacial changes. Reconstructions of past Saharan dust deposition in marine sediments provide foundational records of North African climate over time scales of 103 to 106 years. Previous dust records show primarily glacial-interglacial variability in the Pleistocene, in contrast to other monsoon records showing strong precessional variability. Here, we present the first Saharan dust record spanning multiple glacial cycles obtained using 230Th normalization, an improved method of calculating fluxes. Contrary to previous data, our record from the West African margin demonstrates high correlation with summer insolation and limited glacial-interglacial changes, indicating coherent variability in the African monsoon belt throughout the late Pleistocene. Our results demonstrate that low-latitude Saharan dust emissions do not vary synchronously with high- and mid-latitude dust emissions, and they call into question the use of existing Plio-Pleistocene dust records to investigate links between climate and hominid evolution.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Science Advances

• Publication date

  2019-01-01

• Fields of study

  Geology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aav1887PMID 30613782PMCID 6314818
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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