A. Brauer et al., AMS radiocarbon and varve chronology from the annually laminated sediment record of Lake Meerfelder Maar, Germany, RADIOCARBON, 42(3), 2000, pp. 355-368
The Holocene varve chronology of annually laminated sediment sequences from
Lake Meerfelder Maar agree for most of the record with dendro-calibrated a
ccelerator mass spectronomy radiocarbon dates from the same site. Only betw
een 9710 and 9950 cai BP does an offset of 240 yr appear between both data
sets. At this position, a micro-disturbance in the varve succession has bee
n detected by thin section analyses and was quantified in terms of missing
varves. A comparison with the nearby record from Lake Holzmaar, as well pro
viding high resolution AMS C-14 and varve chronologies, revealed that such
gaps (ca. 2% in time for the entire Holocene) are exceptional for these lon
g-varved maar lake records. Moreover. since sections of missing years appea
r for both profiles at different stratigraphic positions, a combination of
both the Meerfelder Maar and Holzmaar records enables us to bridge erroneou
s zones in varve chronologies. This confirms the high potential of two long
-varved records in close vicinity to each other for the elimination of dati
ng errors rind for increasing chronological precision at a time resolution
that is normally regarded as within the counting errors. Late Glacial varve
and C-14 data beyond the dendro-calibration from Meerfelder Maar and their
tentative tele-connections to other high resolution data sets reveal unexp
lained age discrepancies in the calendar year time scale of about 200 years
.