The Late Quaternary tephrostratigraphy of annually laminated sediments from Lake Meerfelder Maar, Germany

• Published in: Quaternary Science Reviews
• Main Authors: Lane, Christine S, Brauer, Achim, Martín-Puertas, Celia, Blockley, Simon PE, Smith, Victoria C, Tomlinson, Emma L
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: Greenland; Greenland ice cores; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/publications/47be7fd9-3527-46f5-ba90-5b873ba607af; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2015.05.025; https://pure.manchester.ac.uk/ws/files/23410810/POST-PEER-REVIEW-NON-PUBLISHERS.PDF

The record of Late Quaternary environmental change within the sediments of Meerfelder Maar in the Eifel region of Germany is renowned for its high precision chronology, which is annually laminated throughout the Last Glacial to Interglacial transition (LGIT) and most of the Holocene. Two visible tephra layers are prominent within the floating varve chronology of Meerfelder Maar. An Early Holocene tephra layer, the Ulmener Maar Tephra (~11,000 22 varve years BP), provides a tie-line of the Meerfelder Maar record to the varved Holocene record of nearby Lake Holzmaar. The Laacher See Tephra provides another prominent time marker for the late Allerød, ~200 varve years before the transition into the Younger Dryas at 12,680 varve years BP. Further investigation has now shown that there are also 15 cryptotephra layers within the Meerfelder Maar LGIT-Holocene stratigraphy and these layers hold the potential to make direct comparisons between the Meerfelder Maar record and other palaeoenvironmental archives from across Europe and the North Atlantic. Most notable is the presence of the Vedde Ash, the most widespread Icelandic eruption known from the Late Quaternary, which occurred midway through the Younger Dryas. The Vedde Ash has also been found in the Greenland ice cores and can be used as an isochron around which the GICC05 and Meerfelder Maar annual chronologies can be compared. Near the base of the annual laminations in Meerfelder Maar a cryptotephra is found that correlates to the Neapolitan Yellow Tuff, erupted from Campi Flegrei in southern Italy, 1200 km away. This is the furthest north that the Neapolitan Yellow Tuff has been found, highlighting its importance in the construction of a European-wide tephrostratigraphic framework. The co-location of cryptotephra layers from Italian, Icelandic and Eifel volcanic sources, within such a precise chronological record, makes Meerfelder Maar one of the most important tephrostratotype records for continental Europe during the Last Glacial to Interglacial transition.