Quaternary Deserts And Climatic Change

These proceedings record the results of climate change in many areas which are hyper-arid deserts today but which, almost cyclically, at intervals of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years, have had a much more humid climate.

The Arabian Sea region has several features that make it the best area for studies of climate and palaeoceanographic responses to tectonic activity, most notably in the context of the South Asian monsoon and its relationship to the growth of high topography in the adjacent Himalayas and Tibet. The papers range from high resolution, holocene palaeoceanographic studies of the Pakistan margin to regional tectonic reconstructions of the ocean basin and surrounding margins throughout the Cenozoic.

A synthesis of the environmental and climatic history of every major desert and desert margin, for researchers and advanced students.

The global climate changes that led to the expansion and contraction of high latitude ice sheets during the Quaternary period were associated with equally dramatic changes in tropical environments. These included shifts in vegetation zones, changes in the hydrology and ecology of lakes and rivers, and fluctuations in the size of mountain glaciers and sandy deserts. Until recently it was thought that such changes were triggered by fluctuations in the distribution of polar ice cover. Now there is increasing recognition that the tropics themselves have acted as drivers of global climate change over a range of timescales. The aim of Quaternary Environmental Change in the Tropics is to provide a synthesis of the changes that occurred in tropical terrestrial and marine systems during the Pleistocene and Holocene, complementing data-derived reconstructions with output from state-of-the-art climate models. It is targeted at final-year undergraduate students and research specialists, but will provide an introduction to tropical Quaternary research for a variety of other readers.

This is the first comprehensive survey of all the deserts of Arabia, based largely on the author’s 50 years of experience there. The text deals with every kind of desert in the region, from vast sand seas to clay pans and stony plains to volcanic flows. Along with dune types unique to the region the author outlines climatic changes, current ecology and human influence on desertification.

Due to political pressures, prior to the 1990s little was known about the nature of human foraging adaptations in the deserts, grasslands, and mountains of north western China during the last glacial period. Even less was known about the transition to agriculture that followed. Now open to foreign visitation, there is now an increasing understanding of the foraging strategies which led both to the development of millet agriculture and to the utilization of the extreme environments of the Tibetan Plateau. This text explores the transition from the foraging societies of the Late Paleolithic to the emergence of settled farming societies and the emergent pastoralism of the middle Neolithic striving to help answer the diverse and numerous questions of this critical transitional period. * Examines the transition from foraging societies of the Late Paleolithic to the emergence of settled farming societies and the emergent pastoralism of the middle Neolithic * Explores explanatory models for the links between climate change and cultural change that may have influenced the development of millet agriculture * Reviews the relationship between climate change and population expansions and contraditions during the late Quaternary

About one-third of the Earth’s land surface experiences a desert climate, and this area supports approximately 15% of the planet’s population. This percentage continues to grow, and with this growth comes the need to acquire and apply an understanding of desert geomorphology. Such an understanding is vital in managing scarce and fragile resources and in mitigating natural hazards. This authoritative reference book is comprehensive in its coverage of the geomorphology of desert environments, and is arranged thematically. It begins with an overview of global deserts, proceeds through treatments of weathering, hillslopes, rivers, piedmonts, lake basins, and aeolian surfaces, and concludes with a discussion of the role of climatic change. Written by a team of international authors, all of whom are active in the field, the chapters cover the spectrum of desert geomorphology.

This book brings together eastern and western scholarship on a controversial subject: a catastrophic inundation of the Pontic basin which might have inspired the biblical story of Noah’s flood. In 35 papers, many previously unavailable in English, experts in oceanography, marine geology, paleoclimate, paleoenvironment, archaeology, and linguistic spread offer data and arguments for or against the flood hypothesis. Appendices include 600 radiocarbon dates from the region, obtained by USSR and western labs.