A study of tree rings provided on Thursday the most detailed record yet of at least four epic droughts that hit Asia over the past millennium, including one that helped end China’s Ming Dynasty in 1644.
Data collected over the past 15 years for the study is expected to help scientists understand how climate change can unleash large-scale weather disruptions.
Any drastic shifts to the seasonal monsoon rains in Asia, which feed nearly half the world’s population by helping crops grow, could have serious socio-economic consequences, scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory said.
They mapped out past droughts and their relative severity by sampling the wood of thousands of ancient trees across Asia. Among them was a drought that caused tens of millions of people to starve to death in the late 1870s.
“Global climate models fail to accurately simulate the Asian monsoon, and these limitations have hampered our ability to plan for future, potentially rapid and heretofore unexpected shifts in a warming world,” said lead author Edward Cook, head of Lamont’s Tree Ring Lab.
Prior to the study, published in yesterday’s edition of Science, reliable instrumental data collected in Asia — such as temperature, rain accumulations and winds — only dated back to 1950.
The scientists pointed to evidence that monsoon changes are driven at least in part by variations in sea-surface temperatures, with some speculation, but no certainty, that warming global temperatures could modify and possibly intensify these cycles.
The tree-ring records suggested that climate may have played an important roll in the fall of China’s Ming Dynasty in 1644, by providing additional evidence of a severe drought already referenced in some historical Chinese texts as the worst in five centuries at the time.
According to the study, the drought occurred at some point between 1638 and 1641, most severely in northeastern China close to Beijing. It is believed to have helped fuel rebellions by farmers that eventually contributed to the Ming Dynasty’s downfall.
Southern China is currently experiencing its worst drought in nearly a century.
Rainfall determines the width of the annual growth rings of some tree species. The researchers’ trek across Asia to find trees old enough for long-term records took them to more than 300 sites, to Siberia, Indonesia, northern Australia, Pakistan and as far east as Japan.
“It’s everything from lowland rainforests to high in the Himalayas,” said study coauthor Kevin Anchukaitis, a Lamont tree ring scientist. “You have a tremendous diversity of environment, climate influences and species.”
University of Hawaii meteorologist Bin Wang said the tree-ring atlas is valuable to monsoon forecasters, allowing them to detect short-term and long-term patterns thanks to the detailed spatial areas and the length of the record.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
RSS