Elevation-Dependent Warming Identified During the Abrupt Shift at the Last Ice Age Termination

The current Earth’s surface warming rate may increase with elevation, known as Elevation-Dependent Warming, which has profound environmental impacts on the fragile environments in high-elevation mountainous regions. However, Elevation-Dependent Warming has not been well constrained due to the short duration and sparse distribution of available instrumental data. Here we report quantitative paleotemperature reconstructions for three lakes within the elevational range of 1800–3800 m above sea level in the Hengduan Mountains, southeastern Tibetan Plateau, to show that abrupt warming occurred during ~14500–14000 years ago, and the warming rate was higher at higher elevations. We also find a prolonged cold interval from ~24000 to ~14000 years ago at high elevations, which coincides with the timing of the regional mountain glacier advances. We conclude that the observed Elevation-Dependent Warming was probably driven by the surface snow-albedo feedback caused by the rapidly shrinking mountain glaciers, which had a stronger influence at higher elevations.