CHINESE LOESS AND THE PALEOMONSOON

This paper presents a general review of the recent research advances of the East Asian paleomonsoon, based mainly on studies of the loess-soil sequences in the Chinese Loess Plateau. In the last 2.6 million years, the paleomonsoonal history may be divided into about 166 events on a time scale of the Earth's orbital variations. During the last glacial period, millenial-scale oscillations of the monsoon system were prominent, which can be fairly well correlated with the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles recognized in the Greenland ice cores. The monsoonal rainfall belt has experienced a wide, repeated advance-retreat change during the glacial-interglacial cycles of the Pleistocene. Both temporal and spatial changes of the monsoon system in the Quaternary could have been linked closely to global ice-volume variations.