Lakes in arid zone are sensitive to climatic changes. The lacustrine sediment sequence in Sogo Nur has well and truly recorded climatic events such as the Sui-Tang Dynasty Warm Period, the Song-Liao Dynasty Cold Period, the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the 20th Century Warm Period. Commonly, the climate in warm Periods was relatively humid,accordingly the lake area extended and water level rose, and vice versa. Apart from climatic change, human activity is also an important factor of influencing lake vicissitude, and they played the dominant role alternatively during different periods; the factor of climatic change predominated in historical period, while since the beginning of the 20th century the utilization of water resources by human has became decisive.
JIN Heling, XIAO Honglang, SUN Liangying, ZHANG Hong, SUN Zhong & LI XiaozeKey Laboratory of Desert and Desertification, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China
