Abstract
Claims that Amazon climates were arid at glacial maxima are without radiocarbon dated evidence to justify them. Although aridity has been demonstrated for areas peripheral to South America, like the Galapagos Islands or northern Venezuela, these sites are separated from the Amazon by such climatic divides as the Andes mountains and the ITCZ. Radiocarbon dated evidence from a single site in the western Amazon basin near the Andean foothills suggests descent of montane forest of more than 700m at 33,000-26,000 yr BP, requiring temperature depression of at least 4.5°C in the Amazon lowlands. Cooling rather than aridity might have been a determining factor of glacial climate in the Amazon. Within the Holocene an episode of greatly increased precipitation has been demonstrated for the western Amazon from 1300 to 800 yr BP. Scattered data suggest that this millennial time-scale event might have been one of a long succession in late-Quaternary times.
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© 1987 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Colinvaux, P.A., Liu, Kb. (1987). The Late-Quaternary Climate of the Western Amazon Basin. In: Berger, W.H., Labeyrie, L.D. (eds) Abrupt Climatic Change. NATO ASI Series, vol 216. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3993-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3993-6_10
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