This book presents the study of limnogeomorphology, in which past proxy data such as lacustrine sediments with information on landform development can be linked to modern observed data acquired by instruments, including hydro-geomorphological and sedimentary data.
Traditionally, in the field of earth sciences, it has been thought that geophysical studies dealing mainly with the present process were not smoothly linked to geological studies that originated from historical studies. Although such earth-surface process studies are closely related to those on historical landform development in the field of geomorphology, they have been studied separately. Those two geomorphology studies correspond to process geomorphology (dynamic geomorphology) and historical geomorphology. There have been some attempts to combine them; however, they lacked past quantitative records available for further analyses. In the study of limnogeomorphology, proxy data can be converted to quantitative information to be utilized in future environmental discussions.
This book also covers information not only on large lake-catchment systems, but on small systems. Those include long-term and short-term and large-scale and small-scale environmental changes in east Eurasia such as Lake Baikal, Lake Khuvsgul, Lake Biwa, and small lakes in Japan, Mongolia, China, and Korea.
This book examines relationships between climate-hydrological changes and other phenomena including land use and natural disasters during the Holocene and recent past. In particular, periods of rapid climatic shifts such as global warming and global cooling are examined through paleohydrological and other studies of various lake-catchment systems in East Asia, from Mongolia in the north to Taiwan in the south. A number of different research techniques are used in the work presented here, including sediment analysis and optically stimulated luminescence dating and the reader learns how the lake-catchment system functions as a "proxy observatory" for past and present environmental monitoring. The lake catchments studied by the authors of this volume are under similar climatic conditions, i.e., under the East Asia monsoon, with some systematic difference in climatic factors. Both proxy and observation data are available for the surrounding countries' provisions against natural disasters that are related to climate-hydrological events and readers will see how present instrumental observation data can be connected to past proxy data (sediment information) in the system.