Pliocene dust storms across Asia as an analogue for future climate change?

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The proposed project aims to reconstruct the frequency, intensity, and source regions of Asian dust storms during the mid-Pliocene Warm Period (mPWP; 3.264–3.025 Ma), and to identify the driving mechanisms involved. Because the mPWP was globally warmer and had a smaller Northern Hemisphere ice volume than today, it is an ideal template for dust-storm activity in a future warmer world. Understanding the factors that cause and modulate dust emissions, and foster long-range particle transport under warmer-than-today climate conditions, is fundamentally important in order to forecast the impact of dust storms on the Earth system as a consequence of future global warming. To accomplish the above-mentioned aims, the project is composed of three work packages that apply a variety of geochemical and sedimentological proxies (oxygen and carbon isotopes, Mg/Ca ratios, radiogenic neodymium [Nd] and lead [Pb] isotopes, clay mineralogy, and grain-size) to high-deposition-rate marine Core ORI-891-16-P2 from the South China Sea. Based on its position situated near the southern path of Asian dust storms, this core is exceptionally well suited to capture the occurrence of particularly potent dust storms. In detail, the three work packages will (i) yield a precise mPWP dust-storm chronology, (ii) identify the driving mechanisms underlying Asian dust-storm activity during the mPWP, and (iii) identify the respective source regions.