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Deserts and sandylands that are located in the semi-arid and arid regions in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere are usually regarded as environmentally sensitive change belts which respond to global climatic change. In northern China, activation or immobilization of sand dunes is mainly influenced by humid and dry variation and is related to stronger or weaker Asian monsoons. In this paper, the history of Holocene millennial-scale climatic and environmental change is reconstructed by the systematic analysis of the geochemical element contents and parameters, along with the OSL and 14C chronologies, from the different lithologies of the palaeosol–aeolian sand sequence in the south-eastern Mu Us Desert, northern China. Our results indicate that the region was dominated by a dry climate with intensive aeolian activity before 7.2 ka BP, and there was an optimal humid climate and fixed desert in 7.2–4.6 ka. Afterwards, the dune fields became mobile again as the effective humidity declined. Additionally, six dry events were discovered with times of ~7.2, 7.0–6.8, 6.6–5.7, 4.6–4.1, 3.7–3.5, and 3.3–2.5 ka, which were not only coincident with the intervals of millennial-scale weaker Asian summer monsoons, but also accordant with the cold events evidenced in the ice cores and deep-sea deposits of the high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. In general, the Holocene climatic and environmental changes had the characteristics of the “monsoonal mode” and “abrupt millennial-scale oscillation” in the Mu Us Desert.

The role of mud volcanoes (MVs) as a source of methane (CH4) flux to the atmosphere and the ocean has been increasingly recognised in the last several years (Milkov 2000; Dimitrov 2002, 2003; Etiope and Klusman 2002; Kopf 2002, 2003; Milkov et al. 2003; Etiope and Milkov 2004). In one of the most recent papers, Kopf (2003) claims to report a reliable estimate of the global CH4 emission from MVs. However, the significance and usefulness of the estimate presented by Kopf (2003) are rather poor. The used dataset is smaller than in previous studies (although the author makes a reverse claim), and some previously published works are misquoted and misinterpreted. Numerous arithmetic mistakes made during simple calculations and data manipulations lead to confusing results and conclusions. In this comment, we highlight some of the most significant problems with the estimates published by Kopf (2003).