Late Quaternary Hydrological, Paleoenvironmental and Geomorphological Processes in the Tibetan Plateau and Its Adjacent Areas

The Tibetan Plateau has huge impacts on the climate in Asia and even in the Northern Hemisphere. It serves as the headwaters for at least ten large rivers, partly due to its glaciers, and provides dust for downwind areas from the Chinese Loess Plateau to Greenland. Over the last few decades, many new datasets have been published on surficial processes of this area during the late Quaternary, including chronological, organic, and inorganic environmental proxies. The integration of these datasets will better understand the plateau and its adjacent areas, even for the global warming issues. It would be timely and worthwhile to organize an article collection on this topic.

This Research Topic provides an opportunity to present new advances in late Quaternary lake evolution within the plateau, fluvial and alluvial sedimentation and dating, aeolian processes and chronology, timing and driving force of the mega-floods in large rivers that originated from the plateau, revisiting the persistent issues on the basis of re-interpretation of existing datasets or understandings from the applications of the new environmental proxy, including the new organic molecular proxy that provides quantitative paleoclimate reconstruction. We also welcome contributions that relate to new advances in geomorphological evolutions from upstream mountain belts to downstream terminal lakes, which involves not only chemical and physical weathering and erosion in the source region but also sedimentation of the materials that were transported and deposited in the sink region. In particular, new advances in paleoclimate simulation are always welcome.

This Research Topic welcomes both Original Research and Review articles. The research region should be related to the Tibetan plateau and adjacent regions, while the Research Topic includes but not limited to:

- Late Quaternary sediment dating and their climate significance;
- Late Quaternary lake-level variation for closed lakes;
- Fluvial and alluvial deposits dating and deposition process;
- Aeolian sediments dating and deposition patterns with their paleoenvironmental implications;
- Advance in new paleoenvironmental proxies;
- Basin-scale geomorphic evolution research;
- Late Quaternary paleoclimate simulation;
- Timing and driving force of mega-floods.