Provenance of Aerosol Black Carbon over Northeast Indian Ocean and South China Sea and Implications for Oceanic Black Carbon Cycling.

Aerosol black carbon (BC) is a short-lived climate pollutant. The poorly constrained provenance of tropical marine aerosol BC hinders the mechanistic understanding of extreme climate events and oceanic carbon cycling. Here, we collected PM samples during research cruise NORC2016-10 through South China Sea (SCS) and Northeast Indian Ocean (NEIO) and measured the dual-carbon isotope compositions (δC-C) of BC using hydrogen pyrolysis technique.

A global carbon and nitrogen isotope perspective on modern and ancient human diet.

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses are widely used to infer diet and mobility in ancient and modern human populations, potentially providing a means to situate humans in global food webs. We collated 13,666 globally distributed analyses of ancient and modern human collagen and keratin samples. We converted all data to a common "Modern Diet Equivalent" reference frame to enable direct comparison among modern human diets, human diets prior to the advent of industrial agriculture, and the natural environment.

Author Correction: Savanna in equatorial Borneo during the late Pleistocene.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

A rapid throughput technique to isolate pyrogenic carbon by hydrogen pyrolysis for stable isotope and radiocarbon analysis.

Rationale: Rapid, reliable isolation of pyrogenic carbon (PyC; also known as char, soot, black carbon, or biochar) for the determination of stable carbon isotope (δ C) composition and radiocarbon ( C) dating is needed across multiple fields of research in geoscience, environmental science and archaeology. Many current techniques do not provide reliable isolation from contaminating organics and/or are relatively time-consuming. Hydrogen pyrolysis (HyPy) does provide reliable isolation of PyC, but the current methodology is time consuming.

Savanna in equatorial Borneo during the late Pleistocene.

Equatorial Southeast Asia is a key region for global climate change. Here, the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool (IPWP) is a critical driver of atmospheric convection that plays a dominant role in global atmospheric circulation. However, fluctuating sea-levels during the Pleistocene produced the most drastic land-sea area changes on Earth, with the now-drowned continent of Sundaland being exposed as a contiguous landmass for most of the past 2 million years.

Australian tropical cyclone activity lower than at any time over the past 550-1,500 years.

The assessment of changes in tropical cyclone activity within the context of anthropogenically influenced climate change has been limited by the short temporal resolution of the instrumental tropical cyclone record (less than 50 years). Furthermore, controversy exists regarding the robustness of the observational record, especially before 1990. Here we show, on the basis of a new tropical cyclone activity index (CAI), that the present low levels of storm activity on the mid west and northeast coasts of Australia are unprecedented over the past 550 to 1,500 years.