UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Early warning signals of the termination of the African Humid Period(s)

Trauth, Martin H; Asrat, Asfawossen; Fischer, Markus L; Hopcroft, Peter O; Foerster, Verena; Kaboth-Bahr, Stefanie; Kindermann, Karin; ... Valdes, Paul J; + view all (2024) Early warning signals of the termination of the African Humid Period(s). Nature Communications , 15 , Article 3697. 10.1038/s41467-024-47921-1. Green open access

[thumbnail of s41467-024-47921-1.pdf]
Preview
PDF
s41467-024-47921-1.pdf - Published Version

Download (2MB) | Preview

Abstract

The transition from a humid green Sahara to today’s hyperarid conditions in northern Africa ~5.5 thousand years ago shows the dramatic environmental change to which human societies were exposed and had to adapt to. In this work, we show that in the 620,000-year environmental record from the Chew Bahir basin in the southern Ethiopian Rift, with its decadal resolution, this one thousand year long transition is particularly well documented, along with 20–80 year long droughts, recurring every ~160 years, as possible early warnings. Together with events of extreme wetness at the end of the transition, these droughts form a pronounced climate “flickering”, which can be simulated in climate models and is also present in earlier climate transitions in the Chew Bahir environmental record, indicating that transitions with flickering are characteristic of this region.

Type: Article
Title: Early warning signals of the termination of the African Humid Period(s)
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-47921-1
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47921-1
Language: English
Additional information: This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10192334
Downloads since deposit
Loading...
13Downloads
Download activity - last month
Loading...
Download activity - last 12 months
Loading...
Downloads by country - last 12 months
Loading...

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item