Climate amelioration, abrupt vegetation recovery, and the dispersal of in Baikal Siberia.

The dispersal of in Siberia and Mongolia occurred by 45 to 40 thousand years (ka) ago; however, the climatic and environmental context of this event remains poorly understood. We reconstruct a detailed vegetation history for the Last Glacial period based on pollen spectra from Lake Baikal. While herb and shrub taxa including and dominated throughout most of this period, coniferous forests rapidly expanded during Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events 14 (55 ka ago) and 12 to 10 (48 to 41 ka ago), with the latter presenting the strongest signal for coniferous forest expansion and trees, indicating remarkably humid conditions.

Deposition records in lake sediments in western Japan of radioactive Cs from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident.

Sediment trap observations of lakes in western Japan before and after Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) accident indicate that changes in the radioactive Cs discharge are influenced by fluctuations in precipitation and geomorphological conditions in each catchment. Contributions of FDNPP-derived (134,137)Cs to the sediment decreased from 19-48% to 10-15% within a few months, implying that the major transport processes of FDNPP-derived (134,137)Cs have changed from direct fallout to transport by soil particles.