Huayu Lu

• PhD
• Head of Faculty at Nanjing University

The Yinshan tomb in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, is the first excavated royal mausoleum of the Yue State and is of great significance for archaeological research on both the Yue State and the Eastern Zhou Dynasty. However, extensive tomb robbing has left no direct physical evidence in the tomb that could clearly indicate its construction date or th...

The global capacity for wind power has grown rapidly in recent years, yet uncertainties in wind power density (WPD) assessments still hinder effective climate change mitigation efforts. One major challenge is the significant underestimation of WPD when using coarser temporal resolutions (∆t) of wind speed data. Here, we show that using daily ∆t res...

High-resolution maar lake records with robust age control provide an ideal foundation for investigating paleoclimate change. However, in tropical-subtropical South China, the carbon reservoir effect of lake sediments is poorly understood, resulting in a lack of high precision records, hindering the comprehensive understanding of regional climate ch...

The Qinling Mountains are a major climatic and geographical boundary, separating both the semi-humid and humid climate regions and two major river drainages in China. The Qinling Mountains have experienced significant uplift during the Cenozoic, which resulted in their development as a major environmental boundary. However, despite the availability...

Mountain‐building events often initiate fluvial erosion waves that usually propagate upstream. Previous studies have delved into the erosion wave, manifested as knickpoint migration, presuming a spatially consistent uplift of plateaus. However, the expansion of plateaus can spatially result in spatially variable rock uplift rates across different r...

Multiple tipping points in the Earth system could be triggered when global warming exceeds specific thresholds. However, the degree of their impact on the East Asian hydroclimate remains uncertain due to the lack of quantitative rainfall records. Here we present an ensemble reconstruction of East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) rainfall since the Last...

The reorganization of the drainage system is a crucial process on the Earth's surface. However, there is insufficient understanding of the process and driving mechanism of the reorganization of the mountainous drainage system. Here we demonstrate an example of tectonic subsidence-induced drainage reorganizations between the two largest tributaries...

Tree-ring cellulose is a commonly used material for radiocarbon analysis. Extracting cellulose is labor-consuming and several devices that enable batchwise extraction have been developed. However, these devices bear the risk of sample contamination. The present study describes a new device which improves upon two aspects of currently available devi...

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1jjPQ,3sl3-3Ta. As a key geomorphic archive, staircase sequences of terraces and sediments record the history of fluvial aggradation and incision, which are related to tectonic activities, climatic fluctuations, and varying base levels. While numerous studies have investigated their influence on the formation of fluvi...

In 2018, an Ionplus 200 kV MIni-CArbon DAting System (MICADAS) accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) was installed at the Laboratory of AMS Dating and the Environment, Nanjing University (NJU-AMS Laboratory), China. The NJU-AMS Laboratory is largely devoted to research on radiocarbon dating and ¹⁴ C analysis in fields of earth, environmental and arch...

Floods clustered in episodes are the most prevalent natural disaster worldwide, causing substantial economic and human losses. Although these events are often linked to time-periods of extreme rainstorms and unique atmospheric circulation patterns, the river basin characteristics affected by anthropogenic land use changes could exert a strong infl...

The stable oxygen isotope ratios of whole tree-ring α-cellulose (δ18OWR) have been interpreted as an indicator of early summer hydroclimate in the Meiyu region of East Asia. However, the underlying physical mechanism often remains unclear. Here we provide a mechanistic understanding through intra-annual tree-ring oxygen isotope analysis and process...

Key Point 1）Hydrodynamic simulations show that outburst flood magnitudes alter flow structures and dictate erosion mechanisms. 2）The simulated Megaflood (~10 6 m 3 /s) produced a typical vortex (an area of recirculating flow), while the Superflood (~10 5 m 3 /s) did not. 3）The vortex varies with flood hydrodynamics, highlighting the threshold of...

The origin of agriculture in the farming-pastoral zone of northern China remains in dispute. The central region of the Inner Mongolia Plateau is located in the core area of the farming-pastoral zone; thus, it is a critical region for exploring the origin of the dryland farming system in northern China. This study selected the Yumin Site and Banan S...

Plain Language Summary The Eocene epoch serves as a valuable analog for future climates. While geochemical reconstructions and model simulations have illuminated lower thermal latitudinal gradients and seasonal variations, our understanding of Eocene precipitation patterns lags, encompassing wet‐dry conditions and seasonal dynamics. To enhance our...

Both regular flow and infrequent outburst floods shape the mountain landscape, but their relative contributions have been widely debated, in part due to the paucity of quantitative data on historical outburst floods. In June 2000, an outburst flood was triggered by a landslide-dam failure in a rapidly exhumed region of the Eastern Himalaya. To inve...

https://www.lyellcollection.org/token/ARSNDEM2JWAUB7HKSEME/Eprints. Fluvial terraces are important archives for inferring changes in river dynamics. In the northeastern Tibetan Plateau (NETP), the Huangshui River flows through broad depressions and narrow gorges. This morphology is the result of strike-slip- and reverse-faulting. The differential v...

The Yaojiang-Ningfeng coastal plain attracted widespread attention since this region is the core area of the flourishing Neolithic Hemudu Culture and rice domestication. However, the availability of accurate deposited ages of sediments from this region are always difficult due to dating anomalies. One of the possible reasons is that previous studie...

The Holocene is a critical period for understanding the East Asian monsoon system (EAM) over long timescales, but high-precision dating and high-resolution records from the Holocene epoch at monsoonal margins of East Asia are lacking. Here, on the basis of closely spaced radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating results obtained from...

The cycle of precipitation change is key to understanding the driving mechanism of the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM). However, the dominant cycles of EASM precipitation revealed by different proxy indicators are inconsistent, leading to the “Chinese 100 kyr problem”. In this study, we examine a high-resolution, approximately 350,000-year record...

The Wei River catchment in the southern part of the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP) is one of the centers of the agricultural revolution in China. The area has experienced intense land use changes since ∼6000 BCE, which makes it an ideal place to study the response of fluvial systems to past anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC). We apply a numerical...

The unique desertification processes occurring under the Alpine climate and ecosystem on the Tibetan Plateau could provide critical clues to the natural and anthropogenic impacts on desertification. This study used the Landsat data to investigate the spatial and temporal distribution of desertification from 1990 to 2020 in two areas (Shannan and Ma...

The Qinling Mountain Range (QMR), where more than 500 hominin fossils and Paleolithic sites have been preserved, was a major center of hominin evolution and settlement and an important link for the hominin migration and dispersal between the north and the south during the Pleistocene in China. The rich culture remains and the related data make it p...

Based on the meteorological observation datasets including daily maximum temperature, daily minimum temperature and precipitation, etc. at61stations in the hinterland of deserts and sandy fields and surrounding area in northern China, temporal and spatial variations of climate extremes were analyzed from1961—2019 by 24 different extreme climate ind...

Extensive fires pose catastrophic threats to both human and natural ecosystems. Understanding the history of fire, particularly Holocene palaeofire activity in densely populated areas, is essential for predicting future fire risks and developing effective fire management policies. The complexity of fire activity is influenced by various factors, in...

The Tibetan Plateau is a fast-warming region in China, whereby the rapid temperature increase affects regional ecosystems and mountain glaciers significantly. Long-term high-quality temperature data are urgently needed to understand how temperature has changed in the past several centuries and the underlying driving forces. In this study, we develo...

Understanding the monsoonal climate over East Asia during the warm Pliocene, the closest analog of the future warm climate, could better inform us of the regional hydrological responses to global climate change. However, the variations and controlling mechanisms of the regional hydrology during this warm period are not determined due to discrepanci...

It is widely accepted that tectonics generally enhances river incision. However, why rivers have not incised further into orogenic plateaus to destroy terrains over long-time scales remains ambiguous. Here we hypothesize that the diverse nature of regional tectonics could have impeded river erosion, taking Yarlung River in Tibetan Plateau as a case...

The aeolian loess deposits in northeastern China have substantial potential for reconstructing the paleoclimate in the East Asian monsoon boundary zone. Identifying the source of the aeolian dust is crucial to interpret the paleo-proxies recorded in the loess deposits in northeastern China; however, traditional geochemical tracers such as Nd and Sr...

Deserts are important landscapes on the earth and their variations have impacts on global climate through feedback processes. However, there is a limited understanding of the climatic controls on the spatial and temporal variations of global deserts. Here, we use climate reanalysis datasets, global land use/land cover (LULC) products and the CMIP6...

The Wei River catchment in the southern part of the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP), is one of the centers of the agricultural revolution in China. The area has experienced intense land use changes since ~6000 BCE, which makes it an ideal place to study the 20 response of fluvial systems to anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC). We applied a numerical...

Chuandong Cave is an important Late Paleolithic site because it documents the early appearance of bone tools in southern China. We used the single-aliquot regenerative-dose protocol for optically stimulated luminescence dating to improve the precision of the chronology for the Chuandong Cave sedimentary sequence. The age of each layer was determine...

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1gg%7E%7E-4PS63KS The detailed evolution of valley-damming by glaciers on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau, including the large Gega paleolake, is reconstructed based on observed sediment sequences, and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating. In total, six main lithofacies associations are inferred that repre...

Formation and evolution of the Asian landform was determined by growth of the Himalaya-Tibetan Plateau and evolution of the Asian monsoon climate during the Cenozoic period. In this process, mountain building and degradation, and river drainage reorganization are the most obvious results. On the other hand, developments of large scale drainages pre...

Since the early 2000s, China has carried out extensive “grain-for-green” and grazing exclusion practices to combat desertification in the desertification-prone region (DPR). However, the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of these practices remain unclear. We quantify and compare the changes in fractional vegetation cover (FVC) with economic a...

Here, we present the first leaf wax record in association with Paleolithic occupations in the Eastern Qinling Mountains of central China. This region has been the focus of numerous archaeological projects, as it contains evidence of some of the oldest (∼2.0–1.2 Ma) hominin occupations in eastern Eurasia and is one of the key areas yielding bifacial...

Asia has a unique set of landscapes, notably characterized by the highest plateau in the world, the strongest monsoon circulation, and an immense arid region. When and how this landscape was formed have long been investigated, but explanations remain elusive. In this paper, through a synthesis of both terrestrial and marginal marine sedimentary rec...

It is widely accepted that tectonism generally enhances the incision of river drainage systems. However, the question as to why on a global-scale, rivers have not incised further or more deeply into orogenic plateaus to destroy terranes over long-timescales remains ambiguous. Here we hypothesize the diverse nature of regional tectonics could have i...

Regular flows and infrequent outburst floods shape many mountain landscapes, but the relative contributions from these gradual processes and infrequent high-magnitude events have been widely debated, in part due to a paucity of reliable data from historical outburst floods. Here we quantify erosion and deposition from a catastrophic outburst flood...

The cycle of precipitation change indicated by different proxy indicators are found to be inconsistent, which results in the “Chinese 100-kyr Problem”. The loess deposited in the past ~350 ka at the low latitude of East Asia is measured here. We find that the magnetic susceptibility varied at 100-kyr and 40-kyr cycles, can be interpreted as proxy f...

The formation and evolution of the landscape of the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP) is debated because of uncertainties regarding dust provenance. We present a quantitative estimation of dust source contributions to the CLP, based on more than 37,100 detrital zircon U-Pb ages, combined with mineral assemblages and isotope analyses. Our results reveal t...

The origin of the temperature divergence between Holocene proxy reconstructions and model simulations remains controversial, but it possibly results from potential biases in the seasonality of reconstructions or in the climate sensitivity of models. Here we present an extensive dataset of Holocene seasonal temperatures reconstructed using 1310 poll...

Plain Language Summary The provenance of silt‐sized particles in the Taklimakan Desert is critical for understanding aridification and climate dynamics in central Asia, as well as the production mechanism of dust—a key player in the global biogeochemical cycles of nutrient elements. Here, we measured the uranium‐strontium‐neodymium isotopes in silt...

Numerous open air Palaeolithic and hominin fossil sites have been discovered in the Qinling Mountain Range (QMR) in central China. However, a small number have been confirmed as dating to the Early Pleistocene. The present study introduces stratigraphic and chronological studies of the newly discovered Guanmenyan Palaeolithic site, Danjiangkou Basi...

Reconstructing the vegetation history of southwest China since the Last Glacial Maximum is crucial for understanding the evolution of the Indian summer monsoon. In this study, we present a high-resolution palynological investigation from a 5 m core from the Ganchi peatland (southwest margin of the Sichuan Basin, southwest China) in order to reconst...

River piracy has been reported worldwide and was regarded as one of the main drivers for landscape evolution. In this study, we introduce an example of river piracy in the northern Qilian Shan (northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau), and further interpret its regional geomorphological implications. Chi-map analysis, erosion potentiality evaluation, an...

Xinjiang, northwestern China, has the largest area of sandy desert landscapes in the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes and is known to be subject to so-called sandy desertification. Longer-term records of changes in the distribution of sandy desert landscapes are required to develop a more comprehensive understanding of mechanisms underlying their...

The Tongtian section of the Yangtze River is located in the central part of the Tibetan Plateau where the neotectonic activity is illustrated by frequent earthquakes, such as the Yushu earthquake (Ms 7.1) on April 14, 2010. The study area is situated in the upstream parts of the Yellow River Basin, the Yalong River and Lanchang River catchments. In...

The rise of grasses using C4 photosynthesis and dominating grasslands during the latest Cenozoic is one of the most dramatic events in Earth's history. A growing body of geological records adds more details to this process, such as the study of fossil phytoliths. Phytolith data make it possible to track major grass lineages over time, and distingui...

East Asian Monsoon variations during the Plio-Pleistocene transition have attracted much scientific interest, but they are still not well understood. We analysed the trace and major element concentrations of the Red Clay and loess-paleosol sequence of the XSC section, on the southern Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP), over the time interval of 4–2 Ma. Fr...

There is great controversy regarding variations in the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) during the Holocene. Simulations and modern observations have revealed that a strengthened EASM results in more precipitation in the monsoon marginal zone. Therefore, quantitative reconstruction of precipitation in this region is the key to revealing monsoon var...

Pliocene warmth has been used as an analogue for predicting climate response to the rapid atmospheric CO2 increase in the future. Pedogenic carbonates provide an essential archive to reconstruct terrestrial paleoenvironment in a warm world. The stable carbon isotopic compositions of pedogenic carbonate (\({\updelta }^{13}{\mathrm{C}}_{\mathrm{carb}...

In the East Asian monsoon region, Chinese speleothem δ18O records exhibit a maximum monsoon strength during the early Holocene. However, other proxy data from lakes or loess, interpreted as monsoon rainfall, show a mid‐Holocene monsoon optimum. This discrepancy may come from specific climate interpretation of different proxies. Here we report multi...

Dithionite-citrate-bicarbonate (DCB) treatment is a classical method for removing iron oxides from soil. The DCB-induced dissolution effects on iron oxides are controversial. In this paper, samples from a typical loess-paleosol sequence in the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP) and from other aeolian dust deposits in southern China were collected, and cha...

Plain Language Summary Rivers in foreland basins commonly exhibit a sharp gravel to sand transition of bed sediment (GST), which is preserved in the stratigraphy as the conglomerate‐sandstone transition (CST). Previous studies attribute the migration of the CST in foreland basins to tectonics of the coupled mountain ranges. Migration of the CSTs is...

In this study, channel steepness and main divide migration analysis were conducted on the Qinghai Nanshan to confirm the activity and evolution of the range. The results showed that the broad and gently dipping northern limbs correspond to relatively low steepness values, while the narrow and steeply dipping southern limbs are characterized by high...

The Qinling Mountain Range (QMR) spans a large region in China and is an important area of hominin activities. Many Paleolithic sites are found in Bahe, South Luohe, and Hanjiang river valleys in the northern, eastern, and southern part of the range, respectively. The Danjiang River valley acts as a channel connecting these valleys and stretches fr...

Loess sequences are widely distributed in semi-arid regions around the world, and are sometimes also located in coastal zones. The accumulations of coastal loess provide a valuable record of both climate and sea-level changes. Here we report sedimentological and high sampling resolution luminescence dating evidence for such changes from two loess s...

Paleosols preserved in the Red Clay depositional sequence of the Chinese Loess Plateau record information about vegetation and regional hydrology responses to global temperature variation throughout the late Miocene and Pliocene. Reconstructing spatial and temporal patterns of environmental change across the Loess Plateau from carbon isotopes of pe...

Loess deposits along the northern fringe of the European loess belt potentially record past changes in dust emission from areas proximal to former ice sheets. Recent chronologies from loess deposits across this region generally agree on greatly enhanced dust deposition rates when the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet reached its maximum extent during the lat...

Dust cycle is actively involved in the Earth’s climate and environmental systems. However, the spatiotemporal pattern and recent trend of dust emission from the drylands in East Asia remain unclear. By calculating dust aerosol optical depth (DOD) from the newly released MODIS aerosol products, we obtain a relatively long satellite-based time series...

Variations of precipitation in tropical-subtropical regions are fundamentally important to human sustainable development. However, the dominant cyclicity and the mechanism of orbital-scale precipitation variations remain under extensive debate. Here, we used a newly drilled core from the Tianyang (TY) maar lake (South China) to reconstruct Asian mo...

SharedIt link: https://rdcu.be/czKfb. River capture is of great significance to landform evolution and hominine migration. In the Qinling-Daba Mountains, there is a viewpoint that Jialing River captured Hanjiang River, but this is still controversial. In this paper, we discuss the drainage evolution processes in intermountain basins at the Qinling...