Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
© The Author(s), 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Earth Surface Dynamics 5 (2017): 781-789, doi:10.5194/esurf-5-781-2017.
Description:
Soil erosion plays a crucial role in transferring sediment and carbon from land to sea, yet little is known about the rhythm and rates of soil erosion prior to the most recent few centuries. Here we reconstruct a Holocene erosional history from central India, as integrated by the Godavari River in a sediment core from the Bay of Bengal. We quantify terrigenous fluxes, fingerprint sources for the lithogenic fraction and assess the age of the exported terrigenous carbon. Taken together, our data show that the monsoon decline in the late Holocene significantly increased soil erosion and the age of exported organic carbon. This acceleration of natural erosion was later exacerbated by the Neolithic adoption and Iron Age extensification of agriculture on the Deccan Plateau. Despite a constantly elevated sea level since the middle Holocene, this erosion acceleration led to a rapid growth of the continental margin. We conclude that in monsoon conditions aridity boosts rather than suppresses sediment and carbon export, acting as a monsoon erosional pump modulated by land cover conditions.
Description:
This
study was supported by grants from Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution, the National Science Foundation (OCE-0841736 and
OCE-0623766) and Swiss National Science Foundation (“CAPS
LOCK” 200021-140850 and “CAPS-LOCK2” 200021-163162).
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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