Researchers have discovered that sand cays in the Xisha Islands in the South China Sea can be a new carrier to accurately record paleocyclones, or cyclones in ancient times, according to a recent study paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The researchers from the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Queensland in Australia have jointly researched the sediment collected in the Xisha Islands.
Sand cays are valuable means of understanding the variability of ancient Holocene tropical cyclones, said the paper.
The cays' development process was closely related to the tropical cyclone activities, which could potentially record paleocyclones. The researchers reconstructed the paleocyclone sequence of the Xisha Islands in the last 500 years and recognized the frequency and strength of the cyclones around the northern South China Sea.
The research shows that frequent cyclones cannot accelerate the accumulation of sand cays, but diversifies the source of the accumulated materials, especially the ancient coral samples.
The researchers also found that one sand cay in the Xisha Islands has accumulated a height of about two meters in the past 500 years.
The results provide a theoretical basis for further study of the accumulation process and dynamic changes of sand cays, as well as records of the ancient environment. (Xinhua)
The analysis of Prof. WU Renguang and PhD candidate Ms. CHEN Zhang from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics showed that the South China Sea is one region in northern Tropics where the SST displays the largest intraseaonal variability in winter.
IAP scientists investigate the variability and relationship between intraseasonal sea surfacetemperature (SST) and surface net heat flux (NHF) variations in the South China Sea and western North Pacic regions. It is shown that the intraseasonal SST variations and their coherence with surface heat flux variations display large differences between winter and summer and between 10–20 day and 30–60 day timescales.
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