Abstract
Understanding Asian summer monsoon changes during the last deglaciation through the oxygen isotope offers insights into future hydroclimate. However, the cause of limited glacial-interglacial shifts in oxygen isotope over eastern China remains unknown. Here, combining oxygen isotope records with isotope-enabled climate simulations, we identify a pronounced east-west contrast in glacial-interglacial oxygen isotope amplitudes between South Asia (larger changes) and eastern China (muted signal), despite comparable precipitation changes. This contrast is driven primarily by ice-sheet forcing, with opposing effects from orbital and greenhouse-gas further damping the isotope response in eastern China. Water-tagging experiments reveal that the weaker eastern China signal reflects competing processes: depletion primarily driven by increased Pacific-sourced moisture from a strengthened northwestward-shifted Western Pacific Subtropical High, alongside enrichment resulting from reduced rainout and enhanced local recycling over the marginal seas. These findings mechanistically reconcile puzzling differences between water isotope and other hydrological proxies across monsoon region on glacial-interglacial variability.
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Data availability
The data supporting this study are available as follows: (1) iTraCE and TRACE-21ka model simulation outputs are archived at the Earth System Grid Federation nodes https://gdex.ucar.edu/datasets/d651022/dataaccess/ and https://gdex.ucar.edu/datasets/d651050/dataaccess/; (2) Paleoclimate proxy data are publicly available from the NOAA; (3) The water-tagging experiments data used in this study are deposited in Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/records/18361391.
Code availability
The iCESM is freely available as open-source code from https://github.com/NCAR/iCESM1.2. Data analysis and plotting were performed with NCL (NCAR Command Language, version 6.6.2, https://www.ncl.ucar.edu/).
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Acknowledgements
We thank the reconstruction and modeling teams for providing the proxy data and iTRACE/TRACE simulations. Our study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42130604), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2023YFF0804704), and the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (Grant No. 164320H116).
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X.W., W.S. conceptualized and led the work. X.W. and W.S. ran the experiments and wrote the initial draft. J.L., Y.B., L.N., Q.W., J.H., and Y.M. contributed to data analysis including validation and interpretation of the results. K.Z., Y.W., and K.C. provided the reconstruction data and clues for data interpretation. All authors reviewed and edited the manuscript.
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Communications Earth and Environment thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editors: Kyung-Sook Yun and Nicola Colombo. [A peer review file is available].
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Wang, X., Sun, W., Liu, J. et al. Distinct glacial-interglacial amplitudes of Asian monsoon water isotopes during the last deglaciation. Commun Earth Environ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03310-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03310-8
