Regional Description: South and Southeast Asia

Important palaeoclimate archives of tropical and marginal-tropical South and Southeast Asia and their interpretation are presented and critically discussed. The importance of Quaternary glaciations alongside geomorphological, sedimentological, pedological and palynological archives for climate reconstruction is highlighted. Early and middle Quaternary palaeoclimate archives (e.g. moraines, speleothems, marine sediments) provide evidence for thermal and hygric climate fluctuations since the early Quaternary, which were larger than the climate changes of the last glacial cycle. Cold phases are characterized by greater aridity in the lowlands. Warm phases (interglacials) were wetter. Temporally high-resolution climate reconstructions that can dispense with far-reaching hypotheses exist only for the LGM, Termination I, and the Holocene. The orbital and solar influence on large and small climate variations (and on the monsoon system) is documented by many different palaeoclimate archives. Terrestrial palaeoclimate records document Arctic influence north of the equator (Heinrich event 1, Younger Dryas, 8.2 ka event) and Antarctic influence in southern Southeast Asia. Climate modelling rarely considers the terrestrial palaeoclimate data of the Asian tropics.