Description: Quaternary East Asian winter monsoon (EAWM) evolution has long been attributed to high‐latitude Northern Hemisphere climate change. However, it cannot explain the distinct relationships of the EAWM in the northern and southern East Asian marginal sea in paleoclimatic records. Here we present an EAWM record of the northern East China Sea over the past 300 ka and a transient climate simulation with the Kiel Climate Model through the Holocene. Both proxy record and simulation suggest anticorrelated long‐term EAWM evolution between the northern East China Sea and the South China Sea. We suggest that this spatial discrepancy of EAWM can be interpreted as El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)‐like controlling, which generates cyclonic/anticyclonic wind anomalies in the northern/southern East Asian marginal sea. This research explains much of the controversy in nonorbital scale variability of Quaternary EAWM records in the East Asian marginal sea and supports a potent role of tropical forcing in East Asian winter climate change.

Description: The Kuroshio Current (KC) is the northward branch of the North Pacific subtropical gyre (NPG) and exerts influence on the exchange of physical, chemical, and biological properties of downstream regions in the Pacific Ocean. Resolving long-term changes in the flow of the KC water masses is, therefore, crucial for advancing our understanding of the Pacific's role in global ocean and climate variability. Here, we reconstruct changes in KC dynamics over the past 20 ka based on grain-size spectra, clay mineral, and Sr–Nd isotope constraints of sediments from the northern Okinawa Trough. Combined with published sediment records surrounding the NPG, we suggest that the KC remained in the Okinawa Trough throughout the Last Glacial Maximum. Together with Earth-System-Model simulations, our results additionally indicate that KC intensified considerably during the early Holocene (EH). The synchronous establishment of the KC “water barrier” and the modern circulation pattern during the EH highstand shaped the sediment transport patterns. This is ascribed to the precession-induced increase in the occurrence of La Niña-like state and the strength of the East Asian summer monsoon. The synchronicity of the shifts in the intensity of the KC, Kuroshio extension, and El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability may further indicate that the western branch of the NPG has been subject to basin-scale changes in wind stress curl over the North Pacific in response to low-latitude insolation. Superimposed on this long-term trend are high-amplitude, large century, and millennial-scale variations during last 5 ka, which are ascribed to the advent of modern ENSO when the equatorial oceans experienced stronger insolation during the boreal winter.

Description: Asian dust and volcanogenic materials are two major components in the northwestern Pacific. Quantitatively distinguishing them and estimating their mass accumulation rates (MARs) are very important for understanding regional and global climate change. Here, we present the grain-size composition of detrital sediments and the radiogenic strontium (Sr) and neodymium (Nd) isotopic compositions of different grain-size fractions of detrital sediments that were recovered from the western Philippine Sea. These new records show that the different grain-size distributions can be associated with 1) Asian dust from the western and central Chinese deserts and Chinese loess and 2) volcanogenic materials that were derived from the Luzon Islands. The MARs of this Asian dust and volcanic materials are obtained by using Weibull-function fitting. The MARs of Asian dust and volcanic materials are coupled with the glacial-interglacial cycle; these values are found to have been higher and more variable during the glacial period than during the interglacial period. We argue that the strengthening aridity of the Asian continent, which is connected to solar insolation and ice volume variations from orbital eccentricity, constitutes an important mechanism that drives the high MARs of glacial dust in the western Philippine Sea. The internal positive feedback of dust may be another important mechanism. The significant increase in volcanic material during the glacial period was caused by sea level changes, which were driven by the ice volume and solar insolation at high latitudes, and by strengthened precipitation from the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is driven by orbital eccentricity and precession cycles on the Luzon Islands. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.