Journal article

Increasing Australian-Indonesian monsoon rainfall linked to early Holocene sea-level rise

ML Griffiths, RN Drysdale, MK Gagan, J-X Zhao, LK Ayliffe, JC Hellstrom, WS Hantoro, S Frisia, Y-X Feng, I Cartwright, E St Pierre, MJ Fischer, BW Suwargadi

NATURE GEOSCIENCE | NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP | Published : 2009

Abstract

The Australian-Indonesian summer monsoon affects rainfall variability and hence terrestrial productivity in the densely populated tropical Indo-Pacific region. It has been proposed that the main control of summer monsoon precipitation on millennial timescales is local insolation, but unravelling the mechanisms that have influenced monsoon variability and teleconnections has proven difficult, owing to the lack of high-resolution records of past monsoon behaviour. Here we present a precisely dated reconstruction of monsoon rainfall over the past 12,000 years, based on oxygen isotope measurements from two stalagmites collected in southeast Indonesia. We show that the summer monsoon precipitatio..

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Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council


Funding Acknowledgements

We thank N. Anderson, G. Smith and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) for logistical support and technical assistance with fieldwork, which was carried out under LIPI Research Permit number 3551/I/KS/2006. We also thank H. Scott-Gagan, J. Cowley and J. Cali for laboratory assistance and O. Ray Lescure for help with Fig. 1. Comments by F. W. Cruz significantly improved the manuscript. This study was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award to M. L. G. and an Australian Research Council grant (DP0663274) to M.K.G., J.-x.Z., R.N.D. and W.S.H. The authors gratefully acknowledge the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) for providing the HYSPLIT transport and dispersion model and/or READY website (http://www.arl.noaa.gov/ready.html) used in this publication.