Ao, Hongrohling, eelcoZhang, RanRoberts, Andrew P.Holbourn, AnnLadant, Jean-BaptisteDupont-Nivet, GuillaumeKuhnt, WolfgangZhang, PengWu, FengDekkers, Mark J.Liu, Qingsong2023-09-132023-09-132041-1723http://hdl.handle.net/1885/299502Across the Miocene–Pliocene boundary (MPB; 5.3 million years ago, Ma), late Miocene cooling gave way to the early-to-middle Pliocene Warm Period. This transition, across which atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased to levels similar to present, holds potential for deciphering regional climate responses in Asia—currently home to more than half of the world’s population— to global climate change. Here we find that CO2-induced MPB warming both increased summer monsoon moisture transport over East Asia, and enhanced aridification over large parts of Central Asia by increasing evaporation, based on integration of our ~1–2-thousand-year (kyr) resolution summer monsoon records from the Chinese Loess Plateau aeolian red clay with existing terrestrial records, land-sea correlations, and climate model simulations. Our results offer palaeoclimate-based support for ‘wet-gets-wetter and dry-gets-drier’ projections of future regional hydroclimate responses to sustained anthropogenic forcing. Moreover, our high-resolution monsoon records reveal a dynamic response to eccentricity modulation of solar insolation, with predominant 405-kyr and ~100-kyr periodicities between 8.1 and 3.4 Ma.This study was supported financially by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Strategic Priority Research Program (XDB 40000000), the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (STEP) program (2019QZKK0707), the Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences (QYZDB-SSW-DQC021), the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology of Chinaapplication/pdfen-AU© 2021 The authorshttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/202110.1038/s41467-021-27054-52022-07-31Creative Commons Attribution licence