Abstract
Fire causes dramatic energy and matter exchanges between biosphere and atmosphere on a regional to global scale. Predicting fires, however, is hindered by the complex interplay of fire, climate, and vegetation. Paleo-fire records provide critical information beyond instrumental records that cover only the past few decades and may be used to assess the role of fire in large-scale and long-term environmental changes. Here we present a 22,000-year multiproxy record of fire regime from a sediment core retrieved offshore South Java, Indonesia. We use microcharcoal in combination with two molecular markers of burning, levoglucosan and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, to reconstruct fire occurrence as well as fire intensity in the past. We show that fire occurrence and intensity were high during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; around 21,000 years ago) and low during the Heinrich Stadial 1 and the early Holocene. Both fire regime and vegetation in tropical regions with high annual rainfall were primarily controlled by rainfall seasonality. However, fire additionally stabilized the savannah (rainforest)-dominated ecosystem during the LGM (early Holocene) but caused transitions between the two vegetation types during the deglaciation and the late Holocene.
Original language | English |
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Article number | e2020GB006677 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Global Biogeochemical Cycles |
Volume | 34 |
Issue number | 11 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Nov 2020 |
Funding
This work was funded through the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) grants 03G0184A (PABESIA) and 03G0864F (CAHOL). Support was provided through the Cluster of Excellence “The Ocean Floor—Earth's Uncharted Interface” in Bremen. Y. R. is funded by CSC—the China Scholarship Council and supported by GLOMAR—Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences. S. vdK. was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) grant BE2116/10‐1. S. S. and E. C. H. are supported by the Netherlands Earth System Science Center (NESSC) funded by the Dutch Ministry for Education and Science. E. J. H. acknowledges the support of the NASA FIREX‐AQ program, grant NNH17ZDA001N. We thank Ralph Kreutz (MARUM), Denise Dorhout (NIOZ), and Monique Verweij (NIOZ) for laboratory support. Lydia Gerullis is acknowledged for data set preparation. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
Keywords
- fire regime
- precipitation
- vegetation