Late Pleistocene millennial scale cycles of aeolian sedimentation in the Dunaszekcső loess record, south Hungary: preliminary data and interpretations

Abstract

Millennial scale warm-cold oscillations in air temperature over Greenland and rapid sea surface temperature changes were recorded in ice cores and North Atlantic sediments for the last glaciation. These events must have been associated with profound environmental changes in Europe, and indeed, millennial scale oscillations in grain size records have been found in loess deposits of Europe and Asia. Unfortunately, the timing of these events are still unresolved due to chronological uncertainties on the order of thousands of years. Major problems are the low precision of luminescence ages and the general lack of materials that can reliably be dated using ¹⁴C.

As demonstrated by 24 OSL/IRSL ages, the Dunaszekcső loess-palaeosol sequence is an archive of climate and environmental changes of the last glacial-interglacial cycles. For the upper part of the section (<33 cal yr BP), the chronology is further refined based on charcoal and mollusc shell radiocarbon ages. Here we show that AMS ¹⁴C ages of some mollusc species having small shells (<10 mm) seem to yield reliable ages in a comparison with charcoal ¹⁴C ages. These radiocarbon ages are consistent, have low variability and define age-depth models with sufficient precision to examine the timing of paleoenvironmental changes in the context of North Atlantic climatic variations.