Plateau

Present-day topographic features of the NE Tibetan plateau. Credit: Science China Press A joint research team led by Dr. Wei Hong-Hong of the Institute of the Tibetan plateau at the Chinese Academy of Science has just published a study on mechanisms for mid-Tertiary uplifting of the NE Tibetan plateau in National Science Review. A…

Vegetation types and their spatial distribution at 10 m spatial resolution on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in 2020. Credit: Science China Press This study was led by Prof. Guangsheng Zhou (State Key Laboratory of Severe Weather, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences) and Prof. Hongrui Ren (Department of Geomatics, Taiyuan University of Technology). …

Climate warming and permafrost thawing on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) have changed the distributive features of permafrost, which leads to alterations in soil moisture and permeability, and exerts profound impacts on groundwater flow regimes on the QTP. Recently, a joint research team from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Lanzhou Jiaotong University and Northeast Forestry…

After a period of steep inflation, Americans have seen monthly price growth ease, but when will things get back to normal? The inflation benchmark, measuring price growth over a year, hit a 40-year high in June after months of sustained price increases. Since then, monthly gains have slowed. While December 2022 prices were up 6.5% from a year earlier, a Wall Street Journal analysis of Labor Department data indicates that annual growth has eased to levels that existed before the pandemic. Inflation…

Schematic diagram illustrating the mechanism how Asian summer climate is connected to the zonal flow over the Tibetan Plateau. (a) Climatological westerly flow prevails. (b) Easterly flow prevails such as in 2022. Credit: He Chao In the mid-summer (July–August) of 2022, extreme climate events occurred over subtropical Asia. Persistent heat waves hit the Yangtze River valley in East Asia, bringing secondary disasters such as…

The world’s emissions have seesawed in recent years, plunging in 2020 amid pandemic-induced lockdowns only to rebound in 2021 and likely edge even higher in 2022. Experts say 2023 could be the start of an emissions plateau, as the world’s largest emitters experience slow growth and invest more in renewable technology. But uncertainty reigns—especially on whether the world can begin the emissions dive necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. “I think we’re still in a world of pretty flat global emissions,”…

Summer precipitation and black carbon emission characteristics. a The spatial pattern of summer precipitation using the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) dataset overlain with summer 500 hPa wind fields for the period 2001–2016, using the ERA-Interim dataset over the Tibetan plateau (TP) and South Asia (denoted by red polygon). NTP and STP delineate the northern and southern Tibetan plateau boundaries. b Plots of the accumulative anomaly in summer…

This chain of mountains is located at the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, has an altitude of more than 4600 m, and is classified as a permafrost region. The geology is complex and the natural conditions are harsh. Credit: Chen Cheng The Tibetan Plateau has experienced prominent warming and wetting since the mid-1990s that has altered the thermal and hydrological properties of its frozen ground. In a new study, published in…

Spatial distribution of lake ice phenology over the Tibetan Plateau. Credit: AIR Lakes on the Tibetan Plateau show a trend of later freezing-up, earlier breaking-up and thus shorten ice-covered duration since the late 1970s, according to a study by researchers from the International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals (CBAS) and the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR) of the Chinese Academy…

Northeastern Tibet Plateau uplift and impact on precipitation. Credit: Miao Yunfa The uplift of the Tibet Plateau is considered to be the main driving force behind the evolution of the Asian monsoon-arid climate as well as biodiversity in the region. Surface elevation is the intuitive expression of tectonic uplift, but quantitative reconstruction has always been a difficult problem. …