Reliability of radiocarbon dating on various fractions of loess-soil sequence for Dadiwan section in the western Chinese Loess Plateau

Abstract

The accurate radiocarbon dating of loess-soil sequences plays an essential role in the reconstruction of the environmental and climatic changes in continental settings during the last glaciation and Holocene. However, our knowledge about the reliability of radiocarbon ages of various fractions of soil and loess samples is still insufficient. Here, we present our study results on radiocarbon ages based on bulk organic matter, humin fraction, and carbonate of samples collected from a loess-paleosol section in the western Chinese Loess Plateau. We compare these observations with the optically stimulated luminescence ages and charcoal radiocarbon ages to evaluate the reliability of these fractions. We observed that the radiocarbon ages of humin fraction are very close to those of charcoal and are consistent with the optically stimulated luminescence ages within the experimental errors. We observed a significant deviation in the radiocarbon ages of carbonate and bulk organic matter from those of charcoal and optically stimulated luminescence ages, likely due to the dilution of these fractions during the pedogenetic process. Our results reveal that, except for charcoal, the humin fraction may yield reliable ¹⁴C ages for the Chinese loess-soil sequence.

Keywords

loess-soil sequence / humin fraction / charcoal / organic matter / radiocarbon dating

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 40971056) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. Lzujbky-2010-120). We would like to thank Dr. Loukas Bardon of the University of Chicago and Dr. Yanxia Zhong of the Ningxia University for their assistance during fieldwork. We thank Dr. Saeed Doroudiani and Dr. Shiyong Yu for their critical reading and editing of the manuscript.

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