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| Titel |
Large-scale transitions in Plio-Pleistocene African dust flux dynamics identified by recurrence network analysis |
| VerfasserIn |
Reik Donner, Jonathan F. Donges, Martin H. Trauth, Norbert Marwan, Jürgen Kurths |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2011
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 13 (2011) |
| Datensatznummer |
250057109
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| Zusammenfassung |
| These days, long-term environmental changes are believed to have acted as a key factor in the
evolutionary history of the human race. For the Plio-Pleistocene climate history of East
Africa (the ”cradle of mankind”), recent studies on terrestrial as well as marine paleoclimate
archives suggested different possible climatic forcing mechanisms. Here, we apply
recurrence network analysis, a novel nonlinear statistical technique, to three distinct
marine records of terrigeneous dust flux. Our method identifies subtle transitions
between qualitatively different types of dust flux dynamics at about (i) 3.45-3.05,
(ii) 2.1-1.7, and (iii) 1.2-0.7 Myr BP, which reflect changes in the variability of
environmental conditions in North and East Africa. The timing of the identified
transition periods reveals both low- and high-latitude climatic changes as possible
dynamic origins of the observed regime shifts, the sources of which are identified and
critically discussed. We show that the obtained results are qualitatively robust under
changes of the relevant parameters of our analysis method, including detrending,
choice of the size of the running window used for analysis, and embedding delay. |
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