About this Research Topic

Background

The Asian monsoon plays a vital role in landscape evolution, changes in vegetation cover and socio-economic well-being of almost half of the world’s population. The variability in monsoonal rainfall can cause cascading impacts on the region's economy and human livelihood. Understanding the magnitude, frequency and causal mechanisms of extreme events, and their impacts on humans and ecosystems is a pressing research need. The repository of high-resolution and precisely dated climate records from the region provides a useful gauge for estimating the timing and nature of these extreme climate events and understanding how sensitive regions will respond to future global warming scenarios.

The Holocene paleoenvironmental records provide unique insights into the patterns of natural climate variability and its forcing factors, as well as their ecological and geomorphological impacts. However, there is little consensus about the duration and causes of centennial- and decadal-scale fluctuations in monsoon precipitation, and factors controlling spatial synchronicities in the Asian monsoon subsystems during the Holocene. These knowledge gaps have been mostly due to the lack of data coverage, especially of proxy observations in natural archives, that can provide information relevant to timescales of human interest. Therefore, new and compiled long-term, high-resolution paleoclimate records are needed from an array of terrestrial locations in the Asian continent. Furthermore, paleoclimate proxies developed from sensitive regions in concert with monsoon simulation data will help to better understand the paleomonsoon variations and mechanisms.

This research topic welcomes contributions on all aspects of the evolution of the Asian monsoon during the Holocene, including the rate and duration of climate change and their impact on ecosystems. The primary goal is to address the existing large spatial gaps in paleoclimate data coverage in the Asian continent to develop a comprehensive picture of Holocene climate variability. All article types are welcome, with a particular emphasis on Original Research, Reviews, and Perspectives. Manuscripts focusing on, but not limited to the following topics are particularly welcome:
• The development and calibration of climate proxies;
• Millennial-scale variability in the Asian monsoon;
• Frequency of extreme events, magnitude and timings;
• Climate variability and cultural dynamics;
• Ecosystem responses to monsoon rainfall variability;
• The impact of millennial-scale climate change on landscape evolution;
• Anthropogenic influences on Late Holocene climate;
• Paleoclimate data-model comparisons.

Keywords: Paleoclimate, Holocene, Biogeochemistry, Asian Monsoon, Modelling, Proxy reconstruction

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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