The Loess Plateau begins to build
Dust blown off drying central Asia starts accumulating into a 300-metre archive of climate.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 20 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 100 thousand years
- Era
- Pliocene, Cenozoic
Wind-blown silt from the deserts and glacial outwash of central Asia begins accumulating in northern China around 2.6 million years ago, building a deposit that eventually covers 640,000 square kilometres to depths of hundreds of metres. Because dry glacial periods deposit coarse loess and wet interglacials weather it into red soil, the sequence alternates in a way that records every glacial cycle on land — the terrestrial counterpart to the deep-sea isotope record, and the reason Chinese loess is central to Quaternary science.