Location :New Understanding of Gurbantunggut Desert's Dust Source and Contribution
Central Asian dust has a significant impact on regional and global climate, and it is crucial for the balance of local ecosystems, socio-economic development, and human health. Therefore, revealing the dust sources in Central Asia and their emission contributions is essential for studying the global and regional effects of atmospheric dust.
The Gurbantunggut Desert in the northern part of Xinjiang's Junggar Basin is the second largest desert in China, and the study of its material sources is important for understanding the dust cycle and long-distance dust transport in Central Asia. Despite extensive research on the sand source of this desert in recent years, there are still differing views, and the study on the contribution of dust from the Gurbantunggut Desert to the loess in the northern foothills of the Tianshan Mountains and the North Pacific region is weak.
The Central Asian Loess Research Group of the Institute of Earth Environment of theChinese Academy of Sciences, collected a large number of desert sand samples from the east-west and south-north of the Gurbantunggut Desert. Based on the principal component analysis of geochemical elements and using various research methods such as artificial neural network multilayer perceptron and Metropolis-Hastings resampling, they explored the spatial heterogeneity of the geochemical characteristics of the Gurbantunggut Desert sand and revealed the main material sources of different areas of the desert.
They clarified the genetic connection between the Gurbantunggut Desert and the loess in the northern Tianshan Mountains and its contribution to the dust in the North Pacific region. The results show that the desert sand in the northern and western parts of the Gurbantunggut Desert comes from the Altai and Junggar Mountains, respectively, and the Tianshan Mountains do not contribute much to this desert. The Gurbantunggut Desert is not the main material source for the loess sediments in the northern foothills of the Tianshan Mountains, which may be related to the insufficient silt-grade material produced by the desert itself through abrasion. The study also points out that the Gurbantunggut Desert is not the main source area for fine-grained dust material in the North Pacific region.
This study published in Global and Planetary Change, was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Science and Technology Innovation Project of Laoshan Laboratory, and the China Scholarship Council, and the project of Special Research Assistant, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Contact: BAI Jie, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an, China. Email: baijie@ieecas.cn
© 2015 Institute of Earth Environment,CAS Address：No. 97 Yanxiang Road, Xi'an 710061, Shaanxi, China