Depositional histories of vegetation and rainfall intensity in Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains (northeast Mexico) since the late Last Glacial

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2020.103136Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Late Quaternary vegetation and rainfall records from semi-arid north-east Mexico.

  • Forcing of Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation state on high intensity precipitation events.

  • Less frequent high-intensity rainfall events during cooler late last glacial.

  • More frequent short-lived storms since the B/A interstadial.

  • Expansion of drought tolerant C4 plants after 5,000 cal years BP.

Abstract

An evaporite enriched sediment archive from the dry Sandia Basin located in the water-stressed western foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains (northeast Mexico) was studied to reconstruct depositional histories of vegetation and rainfall intensity in orbital to millennial-scales over the last ~32.5 cal ka. Surrounding vegetation had more C3 plants during the late last glacial and deglaciation and the expansion of more drought tolerant C4 plants occurred only after ~5 cal ka BP. Clastic minerals were sourced from different lithologies within the watershed and their abundances helped to infer runoff dynamics and hence the rainfall intensities. Deposition of more mixed-layer clay represented wetter intervals over the late last glacial and deglaciation. Transportation of clastics from the nearby lithology during these wetter intervals suggested that high-intensity rainfall events were less frequent. Response to the Heinrich stadials (H3, H2 and early H1) was mainly similar (drier) and erosion in the watershed remained less-than-average. Transportation of more quartz-rich sediments from distal lithologies during the late Bølling-Allerød (B/A) interstadial and between ~6.2 and 4 cal ka BP with a depositional hiatus between ~12.7 and 6.2 cal ka BP represented the intervals of more frequent high-intensity rainfall events, possibly related to short-lived storms. We hypothesize that the Gulf of Mexico sea surface temperature was a principal forcing. Total annual precipitation in this region decreased but the frequency of short-lived storms increased during the warmer Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) states. Warmer conditions also led to deposition of more gypsum. Our observation, however, needs further evaluation under the modern-day greenhouse warming scenario.

Introduction

Climate model projections suggest that semi-arid northeast Mexico could experience an increase of more than 2 °C in mean annual temperature in conjunction with increasing greenhouse gases over the next century, and that annual precipitation could decline as much as 10–20% (Cavazos et al., 2013). Consistent with these projections, tree-ring records indicate that droughts have become more frequent over the last century (Villanueva-Diaz et al., 2007; Stahle et al., 2016). The combinations of warmer temperature and decreasing rainfall are expected to exacerbate stresses on water resources in an area where surface water resources are scarce and groundwater supplies have significantly depleted. Models also predict that future warming of the atmosphere will increase the frequency of high-intensity rainfall events (Nearing et al., 2004; Zhang et al., 2010; Routschek et al., 2014), resulting in potentially catastrophic flash flooding and soil erosion, particularly in semiarid regions such as the northeast Mexico, imposing significant economic hardships in these areas.

Today, this water-stressed region receives most of its annual rainfall during the warm season with moisture sourced from the tropical Atlantic Ocean (i.e. Gulf of Mexico (GoM) and Caribbean Sea) and minimal amounts of the winter precipitation is associated with cold fronts (Mestas-Nuñez et al., 2005; Wang et al., 2006, Wang et al., 2011; Amador, 2008; Sánchez-Santillán et al., 2012). The early summer rainfall is associated with the Low Level Jet (LLJ) and the late summer-autumn rainfall is associated with tropical storms and hurricanes (Jones et al., 2003; Wang et al., 2006). Changes in the North Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) modulate the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) as well as the hurricane activity in the region (Goldenberg et al., 2001; Poore et al., 2009). The intensity and landfall of hurricanes are modulated by different phases of the AMO (Goldenberg et al., 2001). Sánchez-Santillán et al. (2012) reported that total annual precipitation increased during the cooler phase of AMO (i.e. 1964–1989 CE) due to more summer precipitation and thus the condition of northeast Mexico changed from dry to sub-humid. El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) also influences the amount and spatial distribution of warm season rainfall across the region (Magaña et al., 2003). During the years with La Niña conditions, the summer precipitation of northeast Mexico returns to normal and it even remains above the climatological mean due to location of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) at higher latitudes, weaker subsidence over the northern Mexico and recovery of hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean (Magaña et al., 2003).

In recent years, the greater efforts at generating paleoclimate data for the arid and semi-arid parts of Mexico have greatly improved our understanding of past hydroclimatic changes. The paleosalinity and paleoerosion/discharge records obtained from geochemical variations in paleolacustrine sedimentary archives were interpreted in terms of seasonality and geographic distributions of precipitation (Barron et al., 2012; Roy et al., 2012, Roy et al., 2015, Roy et al., 2016; Ortega-Rosas et al., 2017). The regime of westerly winter storms was stronger during ~48–14 cal ka BP (Roy et al., 2012). It, however, had minimal influence south of the 29° N latitude (Roy et al., 2013a). Wetter conditions in southern part of subtropical North America during the late last glacial was related to more frequent tropical cyclones in the eastern Pacific Ocean (Roy et al., 2015). The North American Monsoon (NAM) became stronger and tropical cyclones became more frequent post ~14 cal ka BP (Roy et al., 2012, Roy et al., 2014). Barron et al. (2012) proposed that a broader region received enhanced moisture from the subtropical Pacific Ocean prior to ~8 cal ka BP and subsequently, the Gulf of California became principal driver of the summer precipitation. Droughts reconstructed from abundances of authigenic carbonate in the eastern foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains had an orbital-scale similarity with spring insolation (Quiroz-Jiménez et al., 2018). Although fossil pollen is generally poorly preserved in most sedimentary archives (Lozano-García et al., 2002; Metcalfe et al., 2002), the existing records suggest that vegetation responded to changes in the precipitation. The coniferous forest expanded to lower elevations during the late last glacial and subsequently retreated back to higher altitudes over the deglaciation at northern part of the Baja California Peninsula (Lozano-García et al., 2002). Vegetation composition of the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains changed from Juniperus-Pinus woodland to xeric grassland over the deglaciation and warm mixed forest of this region appeared during the early Holocene (Ortega-Rosas et al., 2008, Ortega-Rosas et al., 2016).

The Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains have comparatively less information. Paleoclimate records from the El Potosi Basin suggest that moisture advection was greater during the Bølling-Allerød (B/A) interstadial compared to the Younger Dryas (YD) stadial and the transportation of sediments from the arid watershed enhanced during the late Holocene (Roy et al., 2016). Biomarker-based proxies generated in organic poor sediments from the same basin related the sources of organic matter to surrounding vegetation, bacterial biomass and aquatic microfauna during distinct stages over the last 20 cal ka (Chávez-Lara et al., 2019). In this study, we present a new set of proxy records from a new location from western foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains to reconstruct the responses of vegetation and sediments to hydroclimate changes occurred in orbital to millennial-scales since the late last glacial and fill in some of the existing gaps in the paleoclimate history of this region. We used carbon isotope compositions of the bulk organic matter (δ13Corg) preserved in an evaporite-rich lacustrine archive to reconstruct the past vegetation in terms of abundances of C3 and C4 plants as C/N values are perturbed due to oxidation of organic matter and the sediments lack fossil pollen (e.g. Bender, 1968; Arens et al., 2000; Kohn, 2010). Abundances of clay mineral and quartz in the sediments are used as proxies to reconstruct sources of the detrital materials, and thus to infer changes in erosive power of the runoff. Together, these data highlight the relationships between paleovegetation and intensity of the rainfall events since the late last glacial.

Section snippets

Location

The endorheic Sandia Basin (24° 11′ N, 100° 06′ W, 1580 m asl) is located in the western foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains, at distances of ~240 km from the GoM and ~800 km from the Pacific Ocean, in the northeast Mexico (Fig. 1a). This N-S oriented basin is completely dry, and it has a maximum length of ~24 km and maximum width of ~11 km. The meteorological station at Santa Rosa (~17 km west of the basin) recorded average annual precipitation of ~350 mm in less than 40 wet

Sediment archive and chronology

We described lithology of the sediment column from field observations (Fig. 2a). Sediments of 300–62 cm depth in the lower part of the column have visible gypsum crystals and lenses in a massive light pink silt matrix. The intermediate part between 62 and 27 cm depth is composed of massive light pink silt but it lacked any visible gypsum crystals. The uppermost part at 27–0 cm depth is composed of massive calcareous brown silty-sand, and sediments of 10–0 cm depth contain root remnants.

An

Watershed vegetation

Organic carbon of sedimentary records provides important information about the source of biomass as well as the composition and abundance of vegetation. It has been studied using C/N ratios, fossil pollen and δ13Corg values (e.g. Meyers and Lallier-Vergès, 1999; Metcalfe et al., 2002; Kohn, 2010). More recently, the carbon and hydrogen isotopic compositions of compound specific biomarkers (n-alkane) provided insights to distinguish terrestrial organic matter from the aquatic components as well

Conclusions

Paleoclimate research in semi-arid and arid northern Mexico has witnessed an upsurge in the last couple decades. We present a new set of proxy records to fill some of the existing gaps, such as the responses of vegetation and frequency of high-intensity precipitation events to global climate changes in orbital to millennial-scales. Chemical, mineralogical and stable isotope composition of a gypsum-rich sedimentary archive from the Sandia Basin were used as proxies to reconstruct the

Declaration of Competing Interest

We declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

Authors acknowledge financial support from UT system-CONACYT collaborative research grants (ConTex grant no. 2017-33) to PDR and TMS. The undergraduate students (Maribel Sánchez-García, Fernando Ibañez-Gonzalez and Irma Vargas-Martinez) of Faculty of Engineering of UNAM assisted in the laboratory. We acknowledge suggestions and comments from both the anonymous reviewers and the editor.

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