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Massive gully land consolidation projects, launched in China’s Loess Plateau, aim to restore 2667$$\mathrm{km}^2$$${\mathrm{km}}^2$agricultural lands in total by consolidating 2026 highly eroded gullies. This effort represents a social engineering project where the economic development and livelihood of the farming families are closely tied to the ability of these emergent landscapes to provide agricultural services. Whether these ‘time zero’ landscapes have the resilience to provide a sustainable soil condition such as soil organic carbon (SOC) content remains unknown. By studying two watersheds, one of which is a control site, we show that the consolidated gully serves as an enhanced carbon sink, where the magnitude of SOC increase rate (1.0$$\mathrm{g\,C}/\mathrm{m}^2/\mathrm{year}$$$gC/m^2/\mathrm{year}$) is about twice that of the SOC decrease rate (− 0.5$$\mathrm{g\,C}/\mathrm{m}^2/\mathrm{year}$$$gC/m^2/\mathrm{year}$) in the surrounding natural watershed. Over a 50-year co-evolution of landscape and SOC turnover, we find that the dominant mechanisms that determine the carbon cycling are different between the consolidated gully and natural watersheds. In natural watersheds, the flux of SOC transformation is mainly driven by the flux of SOC transport; but in the consolidated gully, the transport has little impact on the transformation. Furthermore, we find that extending the surface carbon residence time has the potential to efficiently enhance carbon sequestrationmore »from the atmosphere with a rate as high as 8$$\mathrm{g\,C}/\mathrm{m}^2/\mathrm{year}$$$gC/m^2/\mathrm{year}$compared to the current 0.4$$\mathrm{g\,C}/\mathrm{m}^2/\mathrm{year}$$$gC/m^2/\mathrm{year}$. The success for the completion of all gully consolidation would lead to as high as 26.67$$\mathrm{Gg\,C}/\mathrm{year}$$$\mathrm{Gg}C/\mathrm{year}$sequestrated into soils. This work, therefore, not only provides an assessment and guidance of the long-term sustainability of the ‘time zero’ landscapes but also a solution for sequestration$$\hbox {CO}_2$$${\text{CO}}_2$into soils.

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The Younger Dryas (YD), arguably the most widely studied millennial-scale extreme climate event, was characterized by diverse hydroclimate shifts globally and severe cooling at high northern latitudes that abruptly punctuated the warming trend from the last glacial to the present interglacial. To date, a precise understanding of its trigger, propagation, and termination remains elusive. Here, we present speleothem oxygen-isotope data that, in concert with other proxy records, allow us to quantify the timing of the YD onset and termination at an unprecedented subcentennial temporal precision across the North Atlantic, Asian Monsoon-Westerlies, and South American Monsoon regions. Our analysis suggests that the onsets of YD in the North Atlantic (12,870 ± 30 B.P.) and the Asian Monsoon-Westerlies region are essentially synchronous within a few decades and lead the onset in Antarctica, implying a north-to-south climate signal propagation via both atmospheric (decadal-time scale) and oceanic (centennial-time scale) processes, similar to the Dansgaard–Oeschger events during the last glacial period. In contrast, the YD termination may have started first in Antarctica at ∼11,900 B.P., or perhaps even earlier in the western tropical Pacific, followed by the North Atlantic between ∼11,700 ± 40 and 11,610 ± 40 B.P. These observations suggest that the initial YDmore »termination might have originated in the Southern Hemisphere and/or the tropical Pacific, indicating a Southern Hemisphere/tropics to North Atlantic–Asian Monsoon-Westerlies directionality of climatic recovery.« less