Fundamentally unchanged northwestern African rainfall regimes across the Plio-Pleistocene transition.

Authors

Bryce A Mitsunaga, Amy M Jewell, Solana Buchanan, Anya J Crocker, Paul A Wilson, Timothy D Herbert, James M Russell

Published in

Science advances. Volume 11. Issue 25. Pages eads3149. Jun 20, 2025. Epub Jun 20, 2025.

Abstract

Northern African climate is characterized by strongly contrasting wet summers and dry winters. Dust exported by the northeasterly trade (Harmattan) winds creates marine sedimentary records that have been long interpreted to show that northern African climate became drier and more variable across the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary [2.58 million years ago (Ma)], when global climate cooled and high-latitude glacial-interglacial cycles intensified. However, questions about the impact of summer rainfall on winter dust fluxes and thus the history of the African summer monsoons remain. We present a leaf wax hydrogen isotope record from offshore northwestern Africa that demonstrates that rainfall regimes remained stable and varied solely in response to 21,000-year cycles in summer insolation from 3.5 to 2.5 Ma. We infer that the summer rains and winter winds respond to different climate forcings, with summer rainfall driven by solar radiation over the northern African landmass and the winter trades affected by high-latitude climate and meridional temperature gradients.

PMID:
40540572
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 21 Jun 2025.

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