Xiaoguang Qin

Xiaoguang Qin
Chinese Academy of Sciences | CAS

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72
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Publications

Publications (72)
Article
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As a crossroad of the ancient Silk Roads, the historic Lop Nur population of northwest China witnessed substantial cultural integration among the Han, Xiongnu, and Western Regions communities known as the ancient Loulan. However, the dietary practices of the Loulan population remains poorly understood due to the challenging, harsh environment for s...
Article
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Reconstruction of hydrological fluctuations in arid regions has proven challenging due to a lack of reliable chronologic constraints on sparse geological archives. The aim of this study was to establish an independent record of hydrologic changes in the hyper-arid Tarim Basin (TB; northwest China) with high spatiotemporal resolution. We present com...
Article
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The causes of prehistoric human migrations in the drylands of the Asian interior have long been debated among multidisciplinary scholars. The Bronze Age Xiaohe settlements (ca. 4000–3300 cal yr BP) are situated in the extremely arid Tarim Basin of northwest China and exemplify a societal collapse which included a long-distance movement along river...
Article
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The vast drylands of the Asian interior were an integral part of a transcontinental network connecting east to west, that acted periodically as corridors and routeways for human migration. However, our understanding of the prehistoric human occupation of and interaction with this inhospitable environment has been hindered by a lack of direct eviden...
Article
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The ancient Loulan kingdom in northwest China was a key transportation hub along the ancient Silk Road. What determined the burial practice in Loulan is a mystery as many of the tombs were constructed atop approximately 20-m-high yardangs in the north of the ancient city of Loulan. This paper includes the first attempt to provide a geoarchaeologica...
Article
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The Lop Nur region, as the junction of the Silk Roads, played an important role in ancient human migration between the East and the West, especially during the Han-Jin Dynasties (second century CE to fourth century CE). However, the scale and volume of human mobility in the region remain poorly understood. Here, we present a multi-approach (wood id...
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The ancient Loulan, situated on the west bank of Lake Lop Nur, Xinjiang, Northwest China, was an important town on the Silk Road connecting China to Europe. However, this once-prosperous kingdom has been a depopulated zone filled with wind-eroded mounds since approximately AD 500–600. A comprehensive understanding of the environmental setting of th...
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The semi-arid areas at the northern margin of the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) have experienced an increased frequency of drought in recent decades. However, it is unclear whether past monsoonal precipitation in the region were determined mainly by El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability or high-latitude cooling. In this study, we use a...
Article
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The Lop Nur region, in the east part of Tarim Basin, was an important transportation junction between west and east, north and south Eurasia. However, previous studies on prehistoric human activity have concentrated mostly on the Bronze Age, whereas that during the Stone Age remains largely unresearched. Here, we present a new direct evidence of hu...
Article
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Human activity on arid lands has been related to oases evolution. The ancient Loulan, an important transportation hub of the ancient Silk Road, developed on an ancient oasis on the west bank of the lake Lop Nur in Xinjiang, China. Previous studies and historical documents suggest that the region has experienced dramatic natural environmental and hu...
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Both paleoclimatic records and models suggest that the dust accumulation in ice cores and marine sediments, which is often regarded as a direct record of changing atmospheric dust loading and used to estimate its climatic impact, is strongly coupled to the aridity of dust source regions. However, the underlying association of this couple has not be...
Article
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The discovery of the ancient city of Loulan in Xinjiang, China, at the beginning of the 20th century was of great significance for understanding the evolution of culture and civilization in Inner Asia. However, due to the lack of systematic chronological studies, the history of this ancient city remains unclear, particularly the date of its constru...
Article
Henan was the site of development for several ancient cultures during the Holocene. In this study, black carbon (BC) in the Holocene sediment is compared with known climatic changes and cultural events to provide information concerning the link between fire, climatic changes, and human activity in Xiangcheng. Prior to 8000 cal yr BP, the occurrence...
Article
Lop Nur is located in the northeastern area of the Tarim Basin, in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northwestern China. A 210-cm-deep trench section was collected from the center of the lake. Five accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) ¹⁴C dating results indicate that the studied section encompasses the Late Glacial to middle Holocene periods (12...
Article
The combination of high-resolution sedimentary paleoclimate proxies of total organic carbon and magnetic susceptibility of a loess/paleosol section with black carbon (BC) records provides us with information about climate change and the linkage of fire–climate change–vegetation–human activities in the Horqin dunefield over the past 11600 cal yr BP....
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Human activity during the Holocene in the Horqin region, northeastern China, has been widely documented. As an important proxy record of human activity, black carbon (BC) in sediments has been linked to climate change and human adaptation. A loess-paleosol section located in south Horqin was chosen for this study. Holocene climate change and human...
Article
The Lushan Earthquake induced a large number of geohazards. They are widely distributed and caused serious damages. The basic characteristics, formation mechanisms and typical cases of geohazards induced by Lushan Earthquake are described, and compares to the relationships of Lushan and Wenchuan earthquakes between geohazards and earthquake magnitu...
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Based on the palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental evidences of geological history and human history periods, this paper reviews the researches and progresses on the development of the sandy deserts in Xinjiang. It pointed out that the features of tectonic structure in Xinjiang had made both the Tarim Basin and the Junggar Basin being influenced g...
Chapter
The upper reaches of the Yellow River on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau (TP) in western China, is a zone highly prone to geological disasters. Giant landslides in this region are notable for their scale, complex formation mechanism, and for their ability to cause serious destruction. In this study, several different high resolution remote sensing...
Article
:The upper reaches of the Yellow River in northeastern Tibetan Plateau are geohazards areas. The evolution of the Yellow River, chronology of some landslides, and spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of super large scale and giant landslides within the region are summarized using paleoclimate evidence, and the relationship between the intens...
Article
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Sandy desert landscape is a geological product of arid climate and abundant sand materials supply in natural conditions, therefore the formation of sandy desert is an ideal studying object for understanding the interaction between various stratigraphic/epigenetic spheres of the earth system. However, until now, the knowledge about the provenance an...
Article
Grain-size distributions of fluvial, eolian and marine sediments were explicated decades ago. For lake sediments, however, there is still great uncertainty in explaining the genesis of grain-size components due to the inherent complexity of their polymodal distributions. In this study, the grain-size components of the surface sediments of Daihai La...
Article
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Based on the palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental evidences of geological history and human history periods, this paper reviews the researches and progresses on the development of the sandy deserts in Xinjiang. It points out that under the tectonic conditions, the Tarim and Zhungarer basins are greatly influenced by the foehn effects originated f...
Article
Almost all sediments are deposited after transportation and thus the sorting process is absolutely innegligible. Grain size distribution of sediment samples faithfully records their dynamic depositional environment. By investigating thousands modern sediments from different typical depositional environments and comparing with their grain size distr...
Article
Rivers draining the sedimentary platform of northern Xinjiang (the center of Asian continent) are characterized by low discharge under a temperate and arid climate. The influence of rock mineralogy, climate, relief and human activity on natural water composition and export as a result of weathering is a major scientific concern both at the local an...
Article
Chemical weathering is an integral part of the earth surface processes, whose spatial patterns and controlling factors on continental scale are still not fully understood. Highlands of the Asian continent have been shown having some of the highest observed rates of chemical weathering yet reported. However, the paucity of river gauge data in many o...
Article
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Ancient Loulan, an important city on the Silk Road, disappeared about 1500 years ago. The environmental conditions associated with the vicissitude of ancient Loulan have been debated since the city was rediscovered in ad 1900. However, little paleobotanical evidence concerning vegetation and environment in this area has so far been available. In th...
Chapter
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The influence of rock mineralogy, climate, relief and human activity on natural water composition and export as a result of weathering is a major scientific concern both at the local scale, because of the link between water chemistry and biodiversity, and at the global scale, in relation to global climate changes. This study evaluates the inorganic...
Article
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There have been a number of investigations for examining the possible link between long-term climate variability and solar activity. A continuous δ18O record of peat cellulose covering the past 6 000 years and the response of climate variation inferred from the proxy record to solar forcing are reported. Results show that during the past 5 000 year...
Article
A natural water hydrochemical investigation was carried out on three watersheds in northern Xinjiang, China to evaluate the climatic, geological and anthropogenic influence on aqueous major element chemistry in an arid environment. Wide spatial variations are observed in the dissolved solids (TDS) and water chemistry. The hydrochemistry is typicall...
Article
It is widely recognized that lake sediment grain‐size distributions tend to be polymodal and consist of two or more grain‐size components. However, for specific cases, the genesis of each component usually is poorly understood. In this study, the grain‐size components of the surface sediments of Hulun Lake, Inner Mongolia, were partitioned using th...
Article
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The ancient kingdom of Loulan on China’s Silk Road has disappeared for about 1500 years. Historical records have documented widespread cultivation in Loulan which supported the kingdom’s prosperity for hundreds of years. However, no farmland ruins have been found although the ancient Loulan city was discovered more than 100 years ago. In this study...
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Chemie der Erde j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . d e / c h e m e r a b s t r a c t The elimination of grain size's effect is vital to analyze the chemical weathering history of eolian deposits. In this study, the relationship between chemical weathering and grain-size distribution of eolian deposits are analyzed and a new a...
Article
In the arid region of northern Xinjiang, one of the least-studied areas in China, three watersheds, namely those of the Yili, Zhungarer and Erlqis, have become the focus of attention due to rapidly increasing human population and water demands. The hydrogeochemistry of natural water from the three watersheds was investigated. The ionic chemistry of...
Article
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In the past century, it has long been debated in the archeological, historical, geographical, and many other related communities where the capital of the Luolan and Shanshan states was in the Lop Nor region. This paper presents three AMS radiocarbon ages from a newly-discovered ancient city at about 6.3 km to the northwest of the Xiaohe Graveyard,...
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We recovered a sediment core (DL04) from the depocenter of Dali Lake in central-eastern Inner Mongolia. The upper 8.5m were analyzed at 1-cm intervals for grain-size distribution to partition the grain-size components and provide a high-resolution proxy record of Holocene lake level changes. Partitioning of three to six components, C1, C2, C3 throu...
Article
1] The Earth's climate is influenced by the manner in which solar radiation is absorbed and reflected in the atmosphere. In the study, the approach evaluating the radiative forcing of aerosol was used to analyze the climatic effect of dust over the last 140,000 years in the southern Chinese loess plateau. (1) Radiative effect of dust aerosol was to...
Article
The multimodal distribution of grains in loess and dust storm deposits has been widely reported in recent years. Our analysis demonstrates that the interaction of wind, atmospheric turbulence, and dust grain gravity along the dust transportation path results in a multimodal grain size distribution for suspended dust. Changes in the median sizes of...
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Assessments of agriculture at the national scale require the best possible information on the distribution of cropland and the management of that cropland. Official cropland statistics for China contain much information on the distribution of crop types, but are known to underestimate total cropland area and are generally at coarse spatial resoluti...
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Large-scale assessments of the potential for food production and its impact on biogeochemical cycling require the best possible information on the distribution of cropland. This information can come from ground-based agricultural census data sets and/or spaceborne remote sensing products, both with strengths and weaknesses. Official cropland statis...
Article
The glacial environments on the Tibetan Plateau and the mechanisms for glacier and snow accumulation are discussed on the basis of new evidence of global temperature fluctuations and regional biome type changes. The biome types show that extensive snow and glacier fields could develop on the Tibetan Plateau with a temperature lowering of 7–9°C and...
Article
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The annual laminae gray level variations in the stalagmite TS9501 of Shihua Cave, Beijing are studied in detail. The environmental factors influencing the laminae gray level are also analyzed. The following conditions may be necessary to the study on the lamina gray level. A) The seasonal differences of climate in the studied area are strong. B) Th...
Article
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Previous studies have shown that the oxygen isotope ratio (&dgr;18O) of plant cellulose can serve as a sensitive proxy indicator of past climate, but its application has mainly been restricted to tree-rings. Here we present a 6000-year high-resolution&dgr;18O record of peat plant cellulose from northeastern China. The&dgr;18O variation is interpret...
Article
Stalagmite laminae provide a high-resolution geological record of climate change. In this paper, moving spectral analysis is used to analyse a stalagmite lamina thickness record to study climatic variability. It was found that the dominant cycles of the lamina thickness sequence are 2, 3.3, 5–6, 10–12, 14–18, 133 and 194 years. Some of the cycles a...
Article
Interfaces of microlayers, in most stalagmites from China, consist of opaque and organic materials. Observed with microscope, the interfaces seem dark under transmitted light and luminiferous under reflected fluorescent light. Stalagmites in which the two optical characters are unified spatially would be most suitable for cross-dating use, and can...
Article
Grey microstructure of microbanding in thin sections of stalagmite T9501 from Shihua Cave, Beijing was studied. The types of grey and the morphologic features of organic material were classified. The signification of microbanding and annual layer was discussed. The standard distinguishing the false annual layer and the multi-year layer is set up, w...
Article
The stalagmite chronological table is established based on the definition of annual character of microlayers of a stalagmite by comparing the laminated rhythm to natural cyclic processes. Climatic anomalies lasting over ten years and rapid climatic changes such as abrupt changes of mean value, of variability, of trend and of cycles are discovered f...
Article
Within the East Asian monsoon zone the change in oxygen isotope of Holocene stalagmite is mainly related to monsoon rain rather than to temperature. And carbon isotope can be taken as a comprehensive signal which contains the natural information and the information of anthropogenic activity. Isotopic analysis is also compared with the annual layer...
Article
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The results from the regressive relation of phytolith assemblages from modern surface soils and climatic parameter show variations in temperature and precipitation and evolution of vegetation pattern since the last 150 000 a in the Baoji loess section. The impact of changing monsoon intensity in different periods in this area is discussed.

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