A direct link between the China loess and marine δ¹⁸O records: aeolian flux to the north Pacific

Abstract

MOST studies of Quaternary climates conducted during the past 150 years have focused on glacial sequences, and for the past 25 years marine sediments have provided significant further understanding of glacial and interglacial palaeoclimates. An important goal of palaeoclimatology, however, to link the well-known detailed continental records to marine records of similar resolution, has yet to be realized. The classic loess sequences of China provide an apparently continuous record of continental climate over the past 2.4 million years^1,2. The oxygen isotope, δ¹⁸O, timescale developed from the marine record³ gives us a global chrono-stratigraphy of late Pleistocene climates. Previously, it has been suggested in studies of the aeolian component in pelagic sediments that it may be possible to link these two records directly by finding a suitable core from the north-west Pacific downwind from China^4,5. Here we report the results of such an effort for core V21-146 (Fig. 1) and tie the last 500,000 years of the Chinese loess–soil sequence directly to the δ¹⁸O timescale and, in so doing, refine the dating of regional loess and soil horizons.