Differential ice volume and orbital modulation of Quaternary moisture patterns between Central and East Asia

Desertification is of pressing environmental concern in large parts of Asia and directly affects millions of people. Arid Central Asia (ACA) in particular is highly sensitive to desertification and environmental change. Climate change in ACA may be driven by westerly circulation or monsoon variation. However, no consensus exists over their relative importance during the Quaternary and this greatly restricts our understanding of how this region may be affected by future climate change. Here we use the most detailed luminescence dating age model yet produced for ACA for three loess records in the Tianshan Mountains spanning the past 250 ka to show a sharp dichotomy in moisture variation between lowland and high mountain areas. The lowland areas of ACA are subjected to persistent aridity during past 250 ka, while highland areas clearly show dry-glacial and moist-interglacial changes, synchronous to moisture variability in monsoonal East Asia, and both co-varying with global ice volume and greenhouse gas (GHG) variation. In contrast, moisture variability across ACA within interglacials varies inversely with insolation-driven precessional changes. This is directly out of phase with the moisture changes of East Asia, which co-vary with precessional insolation changes, and indicates the influence of Westerly circulation in ACA. Our Flexible Global Ocean-Atmosphere-Land System model simulations further reveal that coupled ice volume and GHG variations dominated climatic variability in both ACA and East Asia over glacial-interglacial cycles. However, the out of phase relationship between the intensity of the Westerly and East Asian monsoon systems during interglacial periods indicates that precessional forcing is responsible for differences in moisture patterns between ACA and East Asia. These observations indicate that moisture levels will not increase even in high altitude regions of ACA over the next several millennia; rather desertification is likely to worsen resulting from stabilization of the Westerlies as a result of low summer insolation.