T Tibetan plateau, covering an area of 2.6 million km with an average elevation of over 4000 m, often called “the third pole of the world”, has fundamental significance to the environment of China, Asia, and the world. The Tibetan plateau is called a “water tower” due to its downstream influence on approximately 40% of the world’s population. It is a region with rich species diversity and a hig...

Prevailing opinion assigns the Tibetan Plateau a crucial role in shaping Asian climate, primarily by heating of the atmosphere over Tibet during spring and summer. Accordingly, the growth of the plateau in geologic time should have written a signature on Asian paleoclimate. Recent work on Asian climate, however, challenges some (not all) of these views. The high Tibetan Plateau may affect the S...

A plateau scale soil moisture and soil temperature observatory is established on the Tibetan Plateau for quantifying uncertainties in coarse resolution satellite and model products of soil moisture and soil temperature. The Tibetan Plateau observatory of plateau scale soil moisture and soil temperature (Tibet-Obs) consists of three regional scale insitu reference networks, including the Naqu ne...

[1] The Tibetan Plateau has warmed most rapidly during the winter months in the latter half of the 20th century. Changes in surface specific humidity and their effect on changes in downward longwave radiation (DLR) at the surface are examined to evaluate the pattern of seasonal warming at different elevations over the plateau between 1961 and 2000. We use observed seasonal changes in specific h...

This study provides a detailed magnetostratigraphic record of subsidence in the Linxia Basin, documenting a 27 Myr long sedimentary record from the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Deposition in the Linxia Basin began at V29 Ma and continued nearly uninterruptedly until V1.7 Ma. Increasing rates of subsidence between 29 and 6 Ma in the Linxia Basin suggest deposition in the foredeep po...

The Tibetan plateau is considered a potential cold trap for persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and plays an important role in the global long-range transport of these compounds. This present work surveyed the concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in Tibetan butter samples collected from different prefectures in Tibet autonomous region (TA...

Disturbances, both human-induced and natural, may re-shape ecosystems by influencing their composition, structure, and functional processes. Plateau zokor (Eospalax baileyi) is a typical subterranean rodent endemic to Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP), which are considered ecosystem engineers influencing the alpine ecosystem function. It is also regarded as a pest aggravating the degradation of ove...

Our understanding of when and how humans adapted to living on the Tibetan Plateau at altitudes above 2000 to 3000 meters has been constrained by a paucity of archaeological data. Here we report data sets from the northeastern Tibetan Plateau indicating that the first villages were established only by 5200 calendar years before the present (cal yr B.P.). Using these data, we tested the hypothesi...

Pleistocene climate fluctuations have shaped the patterns of genetic diversity observed in extant species. In contrast to Europe and North America where the effects of recent glacial cycles on genetic diversity have been well studied, the genetic legacy of the Pleistocene for the Qinghai-Tibetan (Tibetan) plateau, a region where glaciation was not synchronous with the North Hemisphere ice sheet...

a Key Laboratory of Tibetan Environment Changes and Land Surface Processes, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China b University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China c Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130102, China d Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese A...