LATE QUATERNARY LANDSCAPE EVOLUTION OF QAIDAM BASIN, NORTHERN TIBET

The Tibetan Plateau is one of the most important places influencing environment of surrounding areas and global climate change. Understanding the nature of climate change in this region is therefore important for modeling global climate change and the hydrological impact on the surrounding areas, which are home to one third of the world's populations. The Qaidam Basin floor has an average altitude of ~2700m asl and experiences hyper-arid conditions while the bordering mountains of the Kunlun, Altyn and Qilian Shan rise to over 5000m asl and are extensively glaciated. Alluvial fans, pediment surfaces, shorelines and a thick succession of sediments within the basin, coupled with moraines and associated landforms in the adjacent high mountain catchments of the Kunlun Mountains, record a complex history of Late Quaternary paleoenvironmental change and landscape evolution. The region provides an ideal natural laboratory to examine the interaction between tectonics and climate within a continent-continent collision zone and to quantify rates of landscape evolution as controlled by climate and the associated glacial and hydrological changes in hyper-arid and adjacent high altitude environments. The author focus on determining the evolutionary history and dynamic systems of the landscape during Late Quaternary in Qaidam Basin, associated with glacial and hydrological changes in this hyper-arid and adjacent high altitude environment. This will be compared with glaciations, shoreline changes and alluvial fan formation, combined with geomorphic mapping, analysis of sediments, and terrestrial cosmogenic radionuclide surface exposure and optically stimulated luminescence dating. The interpretation of landforms, their temporal and spatial relationships will allow assessing whether most of the landforms formed during times of climatic instability. Interpretation of the environment of deposition of the sediments and landforms provides proxies on the nature of earth surface processes, which when numerically dating will allow us to make paleoenvironmental reconstructions. Taken with the geomorphic evidence it will be able to provide a detailed history of paleoenvironmental change and landscape evolution for the Qaidam Basin for at least the last glacial cycle.