Chinese scholars have made progress in solving the "Holocene temperature puzzle"

Figure 1 Topsoil snail combination sample collection points and loess snail fossil sample distribution in northern China

Fig.

Figure 3 The average annual temperature change recorded by snail fossils over 20,000 years compared with the results of climate simulations

With the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (approval number: T2192954, 41888101, 41830322), the research group of researcher Lu Houyuan of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his collaborators used mollusk fossils in the geological record to reconstruct the annual average temperature and seasonal temperature change information of the Loess Plateau in China for 20,000 years, and provided new evidence
of the annual average temperature change during the Middle Holocene warm period 。 The results were published in the journal Nature Communications under the title "The Holocene temperature conundrum answered by mollusk records from East Asia
.

In the past 20,000 years, the global climate has undergone a major transformation from the cold glacial period to the warm Holocene, which is a critical period for
the origin of agriculture and the origin and development of human civilization.

Lv Houyuan's research group selected terrestrial molluscs sensitive to seasonal climate change as the research object, systematically collected more than 400 topsoil snail combination samples and loess snail fossil samples in about 1000 kilometers in northern China (Figure 1), established the most complete database of modern terrestrial snails and climate parameters in East Asia, and constructed a quantitative conversion function of modern snail combination distribution and four seasonal temperatures and annual average temperatures.

In summary, this study develops a method to quantify seasonal climate parameters using invertebrate communities, and by reconstructing the seasonal temperature change information over 20,000 years, the conjecture that there is a Middle Holocene Great Warm Period and the Holocene temperature change is not dominated by summer temperature in East Asia, which provides key evidence
for solving the "Holocene temperature puzzle".