- Ao, Hong;
- Rohling, Eelco J;
- Zhang, Ran;
- Roberts, Andrew P;
- Holbourn, Ann E;
- Ladant, Jean-Baptiste;
- Dupont-Nivet, Guillaume;
- Kuhnt, Wolfgang;
- Zhang, Peng;
- Wu, Feng;
- Dekkers, Mark J;
- Liu, Qingsong;
- Liu, Zhonghui;
- Xu, Yong;
- Poulsen, Christopher J;
- Licht, Alexis;
- Sun, Qiang;
- Chiang, John CH;
- Liu, Xiaodong;
- Wu, Guoxiong;
- Ma, Chao;
- Zhou, Weijian;
- Jin, Zhangdong;
- Li, Xinxia;
- Li, Xinzhou;
- Peng, Xianzhe;
- Qiang, Xiaoke;
- An, Zhisheng
Across the Miocene-Pliocene boundary (MPB; 5.3 million years ago, Ma), late Miocene cooling gave way to the early-to-middle Pliocene Warm Period. This transition, across which atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased to levels similar to present, holds potential for deciphering regional climate responses in Asia-currently home to more than half of the world's population- to global climate change. Here we find that CO2-induced MPB warming both increased summer monsoon moisture transport over East Asia, and enhanced aridification over large parts of Central Asia by increasing evaporation, based on integration of our ~1-2-thousand-year (kyr) resolution summer monsoon records from the Chinese Loess Plateau aeolian red clay with existing terrestrial records, land-sea correlations, and climate model simulations. Our results offer palaeoclimate-based support for 'wet-gets-wetter and dry-gets-drier' projections of future regional hydroclimate responses to sustained anthropogenic forcing. Moreover, our high-resolution monsoon records reveal a dynamic response to eccentricity modulation of solar insolation, with predominant 405-kyr and ~100-kyr periodicities between 8.1 and 3.4 Ma.