Orbital to millennial scale dust activity and humidity interaction in Central Asia during the last glacial period

Abstract

The factors controlling dust activity and humidity in Central Asia and their relationships remain controversial, partly due to a lack of high-resolution geological records for the mid-to-late last glaciation. In this study, we established an optically stimulated luminescence chronology for the QSHA profile in the Yili Basin, a region influenced by westerlies. Grain size and trace element data were used as paleoclimatic indicators. We investigated the relationships among Central Asian dust activity, humidity, and westerlies strength on orbital to millennial scale from 37.4 ka to 11.6 ka. Our study reveals that, on orbital timescales, humidity is positively correlated with westerlies strength which controlled by precession. Dust activity is controlled by Siberian High which was regulated by Northern Hemisphere high-latitude temperature. Their responses to low-latitude and high-latitude forcing mechanisms respectively and present an opposite relationship. On millennial timescales, humidity and westerlies strength are positively correlated. During Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 2, humidity and dust activity show synchronous fluctuations, while during MIS 3, they exhibit an inverse relationship. Westerlies strength regulated humidity, which subsequently controlled glacial activity in the Tianshan Mountains, influencing dust activity in Central Asia. Additionally, the QSHA profile recorded seven Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events on millennial timescales, indicating a potential link between Central Asian dust activity and high-latitude temperature variations in the Northern Hemisphere. Our findings provide new insights into dust and humidity interaction during the last glaciation periods in Central Asia and contribute to understanding global dust and hydrological cycles.

Keywords

Central Asian loess / Orbital timescale / Millennial timescale / Dust activity / Humidity

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Haoru Wei: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Yougui Song: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Methodol-ogy, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Shugang Kang: Writ-ing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation. Mingyu Zhang: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Software, Resources, Formal analysis. Mengping Xie: Visualization, Method-ology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Yanping Wang: Validation, Methodology, Formal analysis. Li Han: Resources, Methodology, Funding acquisition. Shukhrat Shu-kurov: Methodology, Investigation. Nosir Shukurov: Validation, Investigation. Fahriddin Fayziey: Investigation, Data curation.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

The authors thanks to Prof. Hamid Gholami from University of Hormozgan, Iran and Prof. Rustam Orozbaev from the Institute of Geology, National Academy of Sciences of Kyrgyzstan for their con-structive suggestions and assistance in revising the manuscript. The authors also appreciate the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and insightful recommendations on this paper. This study is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42372220, 42172207), the Youth Innovation Promo-tion Association Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. Y2022102), the Science and Technology Innovation Project of Laoshan Laboratory (Grant No. LSKJ202203300) and the Interna-tional Partnership Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2025.102099.

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