Environmental changes reflected by the lake sediments of the South Hongshan Lake, Northwest Tibet

The 1.07-m long lake core with 1 cm interval cutting, which was obtained by drilling in the South Hongshan Lake of Northwest Tibet, was dated by the 210Pb and 137Cs methods, and a 150-year consecutive lake sedimentary sequence (1840–1997) with 1.4 year resolution was obtained. Some environmental proxies, such as the total organic carbon (TOC), total nitrogen (TN), ratio of TOC to TN (TOC/TN), trace chemistry elements (TCE), CaCO3, grain size, richness of ostracoda etc. showed that they are of well coincidence. These results implied that the environmental background varied from the cold-wet period in the late 19th century, to the warm-wet period from the end of the 19th century to the 1920s and to the warm-dry period since the 1920s. There were sub-variations since the 1920s: the cold-dry/warm-wet fluctuation from 1922 to 1960, the intensively warm-dry period since 1960 with a short cold-wet period in the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s. The humid period from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1970s and the dry period beginning from the early 1980s were well documented by climatic data of the nearby weather station records while the grain size was well correlated to the annual precipitation. Compared with the records from Guliya ice core in the same area, the TOC proxy in the lake core indicating warm/cold conditions well corresponded to the σ18O records representing temperature variations in the ice core. However, the proxies with dry/wet significance in the lake core were different from the variations of snow accumulation reflected by the ice core. It can be concluded that the chosen environmental proxies have clear environmental significance and the lake sediments can reflect climatic and environmental changes at high-resolution.