Talk 1 on Exploring Guge
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On May 17, 2024, the China Central Radio and Television General Station’s Social Education Program Center will launch the documentary “Exploring Guge”. The film comprehensively and accurately introduces the Guge Kingdom ruins located in Zanda County, Ali District, Tibet Autonomous Region through on-site shooting and interviews with professionals, showcasing the relevant historical, cultural knowledge, and local features. The film is scheduled to air on May 17 at 20:31 on the CCTV Science and Education Channel.
The Kingdom of Guge was an ancient kingdom located in Tibet, with its center in present-day Zanda County, Ngari Prefecture, Tibet Autonomous Region. This kingdom is renowned for its cultural and historical heritage, particularly the ruins of the Guge site. Please verify important information.
Some researchers have suggested that the cold temperature and drought environmental may have been the cause to change local crop patten, as the fall of Guge occurred at cooling period called Little Ice Age. But there was no quantitative evidence to prove how much lower the temperature will lead to changes in crop.
“Before this study, there was few high-precision quantitative temperature and crop pattern reconstructions in this region,” said study coauthor Haichao Xie, assistant researcher at the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ITPCAS). “We want to study how climate changes influence on Guge agriculture and farming”
The elements derived from lake sediments could help researchers reconstruct local temperature changes. One was a lipid, or an organic compound called branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs). This compound is produced by bacteria, as they are sensitive to temperature change, they are viewed as a promising tool for reconstructing historical temperatures.
Xie and the research team collected 29 surface sediment samples from lakes in Tibetan Plateau and 39 additional samples from a previously published dataset on Chinese lakes to investigate the relationship between the lipids and temperature. Then they applied this relationship to a 2000-year sediment core from Xiada Co (Co means lake in Tibet), which is near the ruins of the Guge Kingdom, to investigate past annual temperature change during the past 2000 years.
“We found that it was warm during the heyday of the Kingdom, but the temperatures dropped from 2 °C to –2 °C at the end of Guge,” said Jie Liang, lead study author, a postdoctoral research associate at ITPCAS, “don’t underestimate the change of declined temperature, it will lead to the reduction of crop production in Guge due to low temperature and reduced glacier meltwater for agricultural irrigation.”