Last interglacial sea-level proxies in the glaciated Northern Hemisphere

[摘要] Because global sea level during the last interglacial(LIG; 130–115 ka) was higher than today, the LIG is a useful approximateanalogue for improving predictions of future sea-level rise. Here, wesynthesize sea-level proxies for the LIG in the glaciated NorthernHemisphere for inclusion in the World Atlas of Last Interglacial Shorelines(WALIS) database. We describe 82 sites from Russia, northern Europe,Greenland and North America from a variety of settings, including boreholes,riverbank exposures and along coastal cliffs. Marine sediments at thesesites were constrained to the LIG using a variety of radiometric methods(radiocarbon, uranium–thorium, potassium–argon), non-radiometric methods (amino acid dating, luminescence methods, electron spin resonance,tephrochronology) as well as various stratigraphic and palaeo-environmental approaches. In general, the sites reported in this paper do not offer constraint on the global LIG highstand, but rather evidence of glacialisostatic adjustment (GIA)-influenced sea-level positions following theMarine Isotope Stage 6 glaciation (MIS 6; 191–130 ka). Most of the proxiessuggest that sea level was much higher during the LIG than at the presenttime. Moreover, many of the sites show evidence of regression due tosea-level fall (owing to glacial isostatic uplift), and some also showfluctuations that may reflect regrowth of continental ice or increasedinfluence of the global sea-level signal. In addition to documenting LIG sea-level sites in a large swath of the Northern Hemisphere, this compilation ishighly relevant for reconstructing the size of MIS 6 ice sheets through GIAmodelling. The database is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5602212 (Dalton et al., 2021).

[学科分类] 眼科学