The work during the past four years on the magnetic properties of the Chinese loess-paleosol sequences and of lacustrine and marine sediments goes far beyond providing records of glacial-interglacial variations. The work to identify the causes of magnetic-property variations and the detail of these variations are building toward a fuller understanding of the global climate record, climate linkages among far distant regions, the marine and terrestrial responses to climate change, the details of local climate changes, and the different responses from various paleoclimate proxies.
Future advances, especially in the marine and lacustrine realms, will benefit greatly from more research to quantify the relations among sedimentation rate, climate period, and recording fidelity. In particular, much more research on rapidly deposited sediment sequences is required to characterize fully the Asian climate system. Despite the general similarities in Milankovitch periodicities among the different paleoclimate records from the Chinese loess plateau and adjacent marine settings, more work is needed to confirm and understand some of the observed lack of correlation. Such work will elucidate the different expressions of climate change by various proxy recorders in different environments or differences between continental and oceanic climates.
Whatever the setting, further progress will benefit greatly from more research on methods for detecting and characterizing post-depositional alteration. Diagenesis under suboxic to reducing conditions, with respect to the production of bacteriogenic magnetite, the dissolution of detrital iron oxide minerals, and the growth of new oxide and sulfide minerals, continues to be a topic ripe for combined magnetic and chemical study.
Acknowledgments. We are grateful to R. Pielke, K. Verosub, D. Muhs, D. Rodbell, H. Mayer, and two anonymous referees for their reviews and to J. Rosenbaum, S. Banerjee, and S. Lund for discussions. We thank P. Best and C. Gibson for assistance as well as S. Banerjee, C. Hunt, A. Roberts, and K. Verosub, P. deMenocal, and S. Robinson for providing preprints.