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Massive Erosion in Monsoonal Central India Linked to Late Holocene Land Cover Degradation

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Massive Erosion in Monsoonal Central India Linked to Late Holocene Land Cover Degradation Earth Surf. Dynam., 5, 781–789, 2017 https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-5-781-2017 © Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Short communication: Massive erosion in monsoonal central India linked to late Holocene land cover degradation Liviu Giosan1, Camilo Ponton1,2,a, Muhammed Usman3, Jerzy Blusztajn1, Dorian Q. Fuller4, Valier Galy5, Negar Haghipour3, Joel E. Johnson6, Cameron McIntyre3,7,b, Lukas Wacker7, and Timothy I. Eglinton3,5 1Geology & Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA 2MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering, Cambridge, MA, USA 3Geological Institute, ETH Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland 4Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London, UK 5Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA 6Earth Sciences, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA 7Laboratory of Ion Beam Physics, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland anow at: Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA bnow at: Scottish Universities Environmental Research Center, E. Kilbride, G75 0QF, UK Correspondence to: Liviu Giosan ([email protected]) Received: 26 May 2017 – Discussion started: 20 June 2017 Revised: 23 October 2017 – Accepted: 30 October 2017 – Published: 1 December 2017 Abstract. Soil erosion plays a crucial role in transferring sediment and carbon from land to sea, yet little is known about the rhythm and rates of soil erosion prior to the most recent few centuries. Here we reconstruct a Holocene erosional history from central India, as integrated by the Godavari River in a sediment core from the Bay of Bengal. We quantify terrigenous fluxes, fingerprint sources for the lithogenic fraction and assess the age of the exported terrigenous carbon. Taken together, our data show that the monsoon decline in the late Holocene significantly increased soil erosion and the age of exported organic carbon. This acceleration of natural erosion was later exacerbated by the Neolithic adoption and Iron Age extensification of agriculture on the Deccan Plateau. Despite a constantly elevated sea level since the middle Holocene, this erosion acceleration led to a rapid growth of the continental margin. We conclude that in monsoon conditions aridity boosts rather than suppresses sediment and carbon export, acting as a monsoon erosional pump modulated by land cover conditions. 1 Soil erosion in the Holocene gomery, 2007; Wilkinson and McElroy, 2007; Dotterweich, 2013). Transfer of sediment, carbon and solutes from land to On decadal to millennial timescales, climate is the princi- ocean is of crucial importance for understanding continen- pal natural control on soil erosion via changes in tempera- tal margin architecture as well as carbon and other elemental ture and precipitation as well as their impact on vegetation cycles. For example, soils contain about 2 times more carbon type and cover (Allen and Breshears, 1998; Reichstein et al., than the atmosphere and, as a result, small changes in the 2013). Global sediment budgets for the Holocene indicate residence time of organic carbon in soils can significantly af- that humans surpassed these natural controls and became the fect the atmospheric inventory of carbon dioxide (Lal, 2004). main driver of soil erosion by at least 2000 years ago (Mont- Besides heterotrophic microbial respiration, erosion is the Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. 782 L. Giosan et al.: Massive erosion in monsoonal central India principal process that releases carbon from soils. Eroded car- bon can subsequently be degraded/reburied along the aquatic 70º 80º 90º continuum to the ocean (Stallard, 1998; Aufdenkampe et al., 2011; van Oost et al., 2012). a 35º In the absence of historical documentation of human im- Tibet pacts, the complexity of soil erosion hampers the recon- Himalayas struction of carbon transfer processes prior to the last few 30º Indo-Gangetic Plain centuries (e.g., Hoffmann et al., 2013; Dotterweich, 2013; Vanwalleghem et al., 2017). Consequently, global carbon 25º Deccan budgets implicitly assume steady state conditions for lateral Plateau 20º transport and carbon degradation along the aquatic contin- E. Ghats uum in pre-industrial times (Battin et al., 2009; Regnier et al., 2013; Chappell et al., 2016). In contrast, abundant ar- 15º chaeological and geological evidence (e.g., van Andel et al., Arabian Sea Sahyadri Bay of Bengal 1990; Bork and Lang, 2003; Bayon et al., 2012; Dotterweich, 10º 2013) as well as modeling (Kaplan et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2017) suggests widespread impacts of early human land use 5º on continental landscapes, soil erosion and associated carbon transfer processes. 50ºE 60ºE b Here we present a soil erosion history from the Indian Peninsula recorded in a sediment core retrieved near the mouth of the Godavari River (Fig. 1) in the Bay of Ben- gal (NGHP-01-16A at 16◦ 35.60 N, 82◦41.00 E; 1268 m water > 3200 depth; Collett et al., 2015). The age model for the core based < 800 mm yr -1 1600–3200 1200–1600 on 11 radiocarbon dates on mixed planktonic foraminifera 800–1200 was previously published by Ponton et al. (2012). The Go- c davari Basin was not affected by tectonics on the Holocene timescale or by glacial/snow meltwater and strong oro- graphic precipitation, which augment and complicate the wa- ter and sediment discharge of the larger Himalayan rivers Wet evergreen like the Ganges or Brahmaputra. Instead, it integrates rain- Moist deciduous Moist/dry deciduous Dry deciduous fall from the Core Monsoon Zone (CMZ), the region of cen- Arid/semiarid thorny tral India that is representative of both the mean monsoon regime and its fluctuations over the peninsula (see Ponton et d al., 2012, and references therein). Consequently, over 90 % of the Godavari’s water discharge into the Bay of Bengal de- rives from summer monsoon precipitation (Rao et al., 2005), making its sedimentary deposits a prime target for continen- - 1 ± 5 Cenozoic tal climate reconstructions and a repository for sedimentary - 35 ± 8 Deccan volcanics Mesozoic proxies of erosion prior and after the Neolithic adoption of Proterozoic/archean agriculture in central India. e 2 The Godavari sediment system Black soils Red/black soils Originating at an elevation of 920 m in the Sahyadri coastal Red soils Red/yellow soils range (aka Western Ghats) near the Arabian Sea coast, the Laterites Godavari crosses the entire Indian Peninsula toward the Bay of Bengal (Fig. 1a). Currently the water discharge of the Figure 1. Godavari River drainage basin in its (a) physiographical, river is ∼ 85 km3 yr−1 with a sediment load of ∼ 175 Mt yr−1 (b) hydroclimatic (Asouti and Fuller, 2008), (c) ecological (Asouti (Syvitski and Saito, 2007). Because the coastal range lim- and Fuller, 2008), (d) geological (Bikshamaiah and Subramanian, its penetration of the Arabian Sea moisture delivered by the 1988) and (e) soil cover (NBSS & LUP, 1983) context. Core NGHP- monsoon, precipitation in the Godavari Basin primarily orig- 01-16A location is indicated in (a) by the red dot. Average bedrock inates from the Bay of Bengal (Gunnell et al., 2007). As a "Nd values are shown in (d). result, the climate is most humid at the coast (i.e., Eastern Earth Surf. Dynam., 5, 781–789, 2017 www.earth-surf-dynam.net/5/781/2017/ L. Giosan et al.: Massive erosion in monsoonal central India 783 Ghats range) and becomes increasingly arid toward the inte- iment is discharged (Sridhar et al., 2008). Because the shelf rior on the Deccan Plateau (Fig. 1b). The natural vegetation in front of the delta is unusually narrow (i.e., under 10 km reflects this gradual decrease in moisture: the headwaters on at our core location) copious sediment deposition takes place the Deccan Plateau are dominated by C4-plant thornbush sa- directly on the continental slope, resulting in sediment accu- −1 vannah adapted to dry conditions, whereas C3 flora (decid- mulation rates as high as 250 cm kyr (Ponton et al., 2012). uous forests) are dominant in the Eastern Ghats (Asouti and Owing to the narrow shelf, changes in sea level would also Fuller, 2008; Fig. 1c). have minimal effects on sediment deposition at our site, es- Sediments transported by the Godavari are sourced from pecially after the early Holocene when the global sea level two major geological units (Bikshamaiah and Subramanian, reached within a few meters of modern values (Lambeck et 1988). The upper river basin developed on the Deccan Traps, al., 2014). For these reasons our core located close to the a large igneous province consisting of relatively young flood river mouth (∼ 35 km) is unlikely to contain any significant basalts (Cretaceous to early Neogene) that largely span the contributions from other sediment sources, in agreement with Deccan Plateau. The lower river basin developed over old previous studies (e.g., Bejugam and Nayak, 2017). Proterozoic to Archaean crystalline igneous/metamorphic The relatively simple sedimentary regime of the Godavari rocks of the Indian Craton (Fig. 1d). The relatively young system in combination with the monsoon-dominated clima- Deccan basalts retain a highly radiogenic mantle-derived Nd tology and simple geology of the Godavari Basin allows for isotope composition ("Nd of C1 ± 5), while the old conti- relatively straightforward interpretation of sediment sources nental crust of the Indian Craton
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