The Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences

2027 Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences

January 12-15, 2027

Milankovitch Theory's Low-Latitude Puzzle
ID:1514 Oral Presentation

2027-01-14 14:30 (China Standard Time)

Session:Session 17 - Modern and past processes of ocean-atmosphere-climate interactions in the low-latitude Pacific and Indian Ocean

Abstract
The Milankovitch theory has long positioned boreal summer insolation as the key pacemaker of orbital-scale climate change. While this framework successfully explains glacial–interglacial cycles at high latitudes, absolutely dated proxies reveal a persistent "low-latitude puzzle": tropical precipitation variability is often asynchronous with hemispheric summer insolation, a pattern difficult to explain within the existing paradigm. Here, we argue that this puzzle is not merely a technical issue of asynchrony, but reflects a deeper epistemological limitation embedded in the Milankovitch framework itself. Developed within a high-latitude academic tradition and organized around the Gregorian calendar, a tropical-year system designed for obliquity-driven and temperature-dominated climates, the theory reasonably privileges boreal summer as the governing seasonal window. However, for low-latitude regions dominated by wet-dry seasonality, temperature and the boreal summer are not particularly important. Physically, at low latitudes, solar elevation angle and day length, relying on obliquity, vary little across both seasonal and orbital timescales, diminishing the dominance of obliquity-driven climate change. Instead, variation in Earth–Sun distance (precession × eccentricity) becomes proportionally dominant, especially on orbital timescale. Considering that low-latitude climate is governed by the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), and that convective precipitation develops where the heating is greatest, it is reasonable to expect that orbital-scale low-latitude precipitation follows the strongest Sun (i.e., perihelion), with anomalistic year as its natural timeframe. This framework explains the observed asynchrony with hemispheric summer insolation and offers a more plausible physical basis for understanding orbital-scale climate variability in the low-latitude areas.
Speaker
Hu Yang Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai)

Author
Hu Yang Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai)

    Important Dates

    • Jan 30

      2026

      Session / Event proposals open

    • Mar 31

      2026

      Session / Event proposals close
      (Extended to April 7)

    • Apr 30

      2026

      Session acceptance notifications

    • Apr 30

      2026

      Abstract submissions & registration open

    • Jun 30

      2026

      Abstract submissions close
      (Extended to July 21)

    • Aug 31

      2026

      Abstract acceptance notifications

    • Sep 15

      2026

      Scientific program released

    • Oct 15

      2026

      Early bird registration closes

    • Jan 12–15

      2027

      XMAS 2027