Timing and Extent of the Little Ice Age Glacial Advances in the Eastern Tian Shan, China
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2015 Timing and Extent of the Little Ice Age Glacial Advances in the Eastern Tian Shan, China Yanan Li University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Geochemistry Commons, Geomorphology Commons, and the Glaciology Commons Recommended Citation Li, Yanan, "Timing and Extent of the Little Ice Age Glacial Advances in the Eastern Tian Shan, China. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2015. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3506 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Yanan Li entitled "Timing and Extent of the Little Ice Age Glacial Advances in the Eastern Tian Shan, China." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Geography. Yingkui Li, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Henri D. Grissino-Mayer, Carol P. Harden, Jon Harbor, David G. Anderson Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Timing and Extent of the Little Ice Age Glacial Advances in the Eastern Tian Shan, China A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Yanan Li August 2015 Copyright © 2015 by Yanan Li All rights reserved. ii Dedication To my dear husband, Xiaoyu Lu, for his company, sacrifice, patience, humor, tolerance, encouragement, and everything he did for me. To my parents, for their unconditional love and support along the way I grow. To my advisor, for his countless hours of painstaking work to help me in my pursuit of knowledge. To my friends, for sharing fun and pain together. iii Acknowledgments I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my advisor, Dr. Yingkui Li, for his inspiration during the years of my doctoral program. He evoked my interests in glacial geomorphology. This work would not have been possible without his guidance, encouragement, and patience. As his first Ph.D. student, I feel that I benefit so much from his careful and thoughtful cultivation. His wide range of research expertise, his intelligence in problem solving, his enthusiasm in field investigations, his open mind to new knowledge, and his down-to-earth personality make me so grateful to working with him. I appreciate his positive attitudes, which motivated me when I had doubts in myself. For my every piece of achievements, he cheered heartedly; for my more frequent unsatisfactory results or barriers, he helped me find the outlet, or more importantly, taught me how to find the outlet. Dr. Li provided me great help in this dissertation work, from carrying rock samples in the field to rehearsing presentations at conferences, from details of lab operations to manuscript revisions. I also want to thank my great group of committee members, Drs. Carol Harden, Henri Grissino-Mayer, Jon Harbor, and David Anderson. Each of them intellectually stimulates me with their immense knowledge and valuable experience. I appreciate the help and opportunities that they provided me throughout my graduate tenure, and also the cooperative participation that made my every key step towards the graduation achieved. Their expertise in different areas of natural sciences often inspires me with ideas to expand and deepen the current research interests. This dissertation work in Tian Shan was based on an international collaboration of Drs. Li and Harbor and other scholars from many institutes with a goal to reconstruct past glaciations across major transects of Central Asia. In 2010, I was introduced to the group during the glacial/fluvial geomorphology expedition in Tian Shan, supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No. 41328001). In spring 2012, I received a National Geographic Young iv Explorers Grant (No. 9086-12) to aid my fieldtrip of collecting samples in this work. Following some preliminary work, I was awarded a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (BCS-1303175, to Y.K. Li and Y.N. Li) in 2013. Along with other funds and awards from the Department of Geography, I was able to finish this work with necessary training and academic exposures. I am very thankful to these organizations. I am indebted to generous support from colleagues and friends from Peking University, Purdue University, and Stockholm University. They are Gengnian Liu, Zhijiu Cui, Yixin Chen, Mei Zhang, Jingchun Zhang, Marc Caffee, Tom Clifton, Greg Chmiel, Arjen Stroeven, Jakob Heyman, and Ping Fu. Driver Zhang, my mother Xiulin Shen, and my uncle-in-law Junxi Kang are great field assistants, and I appreciate their assistance and company. I am also grateful to my lab mate and dear friend Becky Potter, whose excellent work in setting up the Cosmogenic Nuclide Laboratory made my sample processing possible. I appreciate the help from my friend Jack McNelis, undergraduate assistants Dakota Anderson and Noh Han on lab work and glacier mapping. I thank my old friend Lorelei Bryan for proofreading and editing my writing. Last but not the least, the company of my family, friends, and cats is cherished in my heart. v Abstract Located in Central Asia, one of the most continental regions on Earth, the Tian Shan’s glaciers contribute critical fresh water to populated areas in the lowland. These glaciers are sensitive to climate change, and knowledge of contemporary glaciers and their changes in the past is of critical importance for sustainable development in this region. Constraining glacial fluctuations in recent centuries will fill a gap in numerical constraints on glacial history and paleoclimate information, and provide important evidence on the spatio-temporal changes of the climate systems in the Tian Shan. This doctoral dissertation investigates the timing and extent of Little Ice Age (LIA) glacial advances in the eastern Tian Shan. In particular, I conducted: 1) the mapping of glacial extents during the LIA and around 2010 using Google Earth high-resolution imagery and ArcGIS; 2) statistical analyses to examine relationships between local topographic/geometric factors and glacier change parameters; and 3) cosmogenic 10Be [beryllium 10] surface exposure dating of presumed LIA moraines. The major contributions of this dissertation include: 1) a total of 1173 contemporary glaciers with their corresponding presumed LIA extents were delineated in the eastern Tian Shan; 2) glacier area and mean elevation are the two major local factors that affect glacier area changes, but topographic/geometric factors cannot well explain changes in equilibrium line altitudes; 3) three major LIA advances occurred at 730±300 yr BP, 370±100 yr BP, and 210±50 yr BP were constrained based on 10Be surface exposure ages, and the maximum LIA extent (about 700–900 m beyond glacier termini) was reached asynchronously in different sub-regions; 4) presumed LIA moraines in front of small, thin glaciers yielded widely scattered and much older ages than LIA ages. The glacial deposits in front of such glaciers might have formed prior to the LIA and have been reworked during non-erosive glacial transport in LIA. This suggests vi that inheritance could be a more significant problem than degradation in the exposure age scatter of young glacial event. More dating work is needed to extend our knowledge on LIA glacial advances, and to better understand the influence of climate systems on glacier changes. vii Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction................................................................................................................. 1 1.1. Research Overview .......................................................................................................... 2 1.2. Tian Shan and Related Studies ......................................................................................... 3 1.2.1. Regional context: geographic, climate, and socio-economic settings ...................... 3 1.2.2. Documenting the presence of glaciers ...................................................................... 5 1.2.3. How to determine whether a glacial advance occurred in the Little Ice Age? ......... 6 1.2.4. Factors controlling glacier change ............................................................................ 9 1.3. Research Hypotheses and Objectives ............................................................................. 11 1.4. Research Significance .................................................................................................... 13 1.5. Organization of the Dissertation .................................................................................... 14 References ................................................................................................................................. 16 Appendix for Chapter 1 ............................................................................................................