Dust sources to the Arabian Sea and their record of continental hydroclimate

Abstract

Mineral dust plays an important role in Earth’s climate as it affects radiation budgets, regional hydroclimates and provides nutrients to the Arabian Sea and further afield. Dust accumulating in deep sea sediment has the potential to provide long uninterrupted records of past changes in hydroclimate. However, to read these records properly it is important to be able to trace these dust deposits to their origin. Dust records from the Arabian Sea have long been used to reconstruct past changes in continental hydroclimate. However, this ocean basin is encircled by many arid and dust-producing regions and its dust record has been variously attributed to East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia and further east into southwest Asia. This thesis is composed of three main inter-related studies. In the first, I use geochemical methods (Sr and Nd isotopes) to fingerprint major dust producing regions on the Arabian Peninsula and southwest Asia and distinguish them from those of Africa. In the second, I employ high-resolution remote sensing observations over a four-year interval to map dust activation frequency in the Horn of Africa. Lastly, I report the results of a dust-based palaeo study of hydroclimate change from the western Arabian Sea covering the middle Pliocene and late Quaternary.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Terezia Kunkelova: orcid.org/0000-0003-0032-7604

ORCID for Paul Wilson: orcid.org/0000-0001-6425-8906

ORCID for Steven Bohaty: orcid.org/0000-0002-1193-7398

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