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Orbit-related long-term climate cycles revealed in a 12-Myr continental record from Lake Baikal

Nature volume 410, pages 71–74 (2001)Cite this article

Abstract

Quaternary records of climate change from terrestrial sources, such as lake sediments1,2 and aeolian sediments3,4, in general agree well with marine records5,6. But continuous records that cover more than the past one million years were essentially unavailable until recently, when the high-sedimentation-rate site of Lake Baikal was exploited1,2,7,8. Because of its location in the middle latitudes, Lake Baikal is highly sensitive to insolation changes9 and the entire lake remained uncovered by ice sheets throughout the Pleistocene epoch, making it a valuable archive for past climate. Here we examine long sediment cores from Lake Baikal that cover the past 12 million years. Our record reveals a gradual cooling of the Asian continental interior, with some fluctuations. Spectral analyses reveal periods of about 400 kyr, 600 kyr and 1,000 kyr, which may correspond to Milankovitch periods (reflecting orbital cycles). Our results indicate that changes in insolation were closely related to long-term environmental variations in the deep continental interior, over the past 12 million years.

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Figure 1: Long-term fluctuations discussed in the text.
Figure 2: Dominant periods for the long-term fluctuations.
Figure 3: Filtered curves for mean grain size of BDP98.
Figure 4: Results of spectral analysis with a band-pass filter of period 2,000–350 kyr for five intervals.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the BDP Leg IV members from Russia, America and Japan who worked to drill the BDP98 sediment cores, and J. Laskar, A. Berger and M.-F. Loutre for providing the calculated results on insolation. We also thank colleagues in the hydro-geomorphological laboratory at Kanazawa University and the geomagnetic laboratory of Toyama University for their support in this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, Kanazawa University, Kakuma, 920-1192, Kanazawa, Japan

    Kenji Kashiwaya & Shinya Ochiai

  2. Department of Earth Sciences, Toyama University, Toyama, 930-8555, Japan

    Hideo Sakai

  3. National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, 350-0044, Ibaragi, Japan

    Takayoshi Kawai

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  1. Kenji Kashiwaya
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  4. Takayoshi Kawai
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Correspondence to Kenji Kashiwaya.

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Kashiwaya, K., Ochiai, S., Sakai, H. et al. Orbit-related long-term climate cycles revealed in a 12-Myr continental record from Lake Baikal. Nature 410, 71–74 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35065057

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