Synchronisation of Late Quaternary E. Mediterranean Proxy Records; Developing the Marine Tephrostratigraphy

The late Quaternary marine environment of the Mediterranean has been the target for a great deal of important palaeoenvironmental research for over 50 years. These records must be synchronised to infer the relative timings of significant environmental events. Synchronisation has previously been unavoidably based on 14C and Orbital Tuning of the proxy records; the former suffering from both systematic and stochastic errors, while that latter inherently carries assumptions of the causes of changes in the proxy record. An independent and absolute correlation method is thus required to synchronise marine proxy records. The use of tephrochronology in Mediterranean marine records has commonly been limited to the use of visible tephra layers, or to core sites proximal to Italy (e.g. Bourne et al. 2010). Here we present a detailed tephrostratigraphy for the Eastern Mediterranean (13 isochrons in the past 160ka) derived from two cores; LC21 in the southern Aegean Sea and ODP967 just South of Cyprus. This tephrostratigraphy integrates crypto and visible tephra layers derived from Italy, the Hellenic arc, and possibly the Anatolian volcanic region of Turkey. This study thus demonstrates both that tephras are abundant in the Eastern Mediterranean and that they have to potential to assess the relative timings of important climatic and oceanographic events in this region during the late Quaternary. This work is part of the NERC-RESET consortium project which aims to assess the relationship between abrupt environmental transitions and human archaeology.