Evidence for signatures of ancient microbial life in paleosols.

Loess-paleosol sequences are terrestrial archives of past climate change. They may host traces of ancient microbial life, but little information is available on the recovery of microbial biomarkers from such deposits. We hypothesized that microbial communities in soil horizons up to an age of 127 kyr carry information related to past environments.

Biological soil crusts determine soil properties and salt dynamics under arid climatic condition in Qara Qir, Iran.

Biological soil crusts are a thin layer within the soil system but strongly determine the infiltration, runoff and water and solute movement. Little is known about the role of biological soil crusts on soil solute dynamics in arid ecosystems and the objective of this paper is to determine in Qara Qir rangeland how biological soil crusts control the water and salt distribution along the soil profile. Rainfall simulation experiments were carried out at five locations, and measurements of the soil at 0-5, 5-10, 10-20, 20-30, 30-50 and 50-80 cm depth were done before, 48 h and 21 days after the rainfall simulations.

Early Pleistocene climate in western arid central Asia inferred from loess-palaeosol sequences.

Arid central Asia (ACA) is one of the most arid regions in the mid-latitudes and one of the main potential dust sources for the northern hemisphere. The lack of in situ early Pleistocene loess/dust records from ACA hinders our comprehensive understanding of the spatio-temporal record of aeolian loess accumulation and long term climatic changes in Asia as a whole. Here, we report the results of sedimentological, chronological and climatic studies of early Pleistocene loess-palaeosol sequences (LPS) from the northeastern Iranian Golestan Province (NIGP) in the western part of ACA.