This is a multidisciplinary NSF sponsored project in the Yunnan Province of Southwestern China focused on the late Pleistocene/Holocene. There are multiple facets and aims of this project including:
to improve our understanding of the impacts of legacy contamination stored on the landscape by investigating the natural and anthropogenic processes that control the erosion, transport, accumulation, and redistribution of metals and the sediments that they sorb onto
to develop a continuous record of Indian Summer Monsoon strength to assess the timing, magnitude, and rate of abrupt hydroclimate shifts
to use the applications of the above objectives and collaborate with archaeologists and historians to examine the interactions between land use change, human settlement, and water availability
to assess vegetation dynamics using palynological analysis to investigate variations due to both climate forcings and anthropogenic land clearance
Collaborators include:
Daniel Bain (University of Pittsburgh)
Mark Abbott (University of Pittsburgh)
Fahu Chen (Lanzhou University, China)
Duo Wu (Lanzhou University, China)
JunQing Yu (Qinghai Institue of Salt Lakes, China)
Byron Steinman (University of Minnesota Duluth)
Alice Yao (University of Chicago)
TzeHuey Chiou-Peng (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Xiayun Xiao (Nanjing Institute of Limnology, China)