Decadally resolved lateglacial radiocarbon evidence from New Zealand kauri

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Radiocarbon 58 (2016): 709-733, doi: 10.1017/RDC.2016.86.
The Last Glacial-Interglacial Transition (LGIT; 15,000-11,000 cal BP) was characterized by complex spatiotemporal patterns of climate change, with numerous studies requiring accurate chronological control to decipher leads from lags in global paleoclimatic, -environmental and archaeological records. However, close scrutiny of the few available tree-ring chronologies and 14C-dated sequences composing the IntCal13 radiocarbon calibration curve, indicates significant weakness in 14C calibration across key periods of the LGIT. Here, we present a decadally-resolved atmospheric 14C record derived from New Zealand kauri spanning the Lateglacial from ~13,100 - 11,365 cal BP. Two floating kauri 14C time series, curve-matched to IntCal13, serve as a radiocarbon backbone through the Younger Dryas. The floating Northern Hemisphere (NH) 14C datasets derived from the YD-B and Central European Lateglacial Master tree-ring series are matched against the new kauri data, forming a robust NH 14C time series to ~14,200 cal BP. Our results show that IntCal13 is questionable from ~12,200 - 11,900 cal BP and the ~10,400 BP 14C plateau is approximately five decades too short. The new kauri record and re-positioned NH pine 14C series offer a refinement of the international 14C calibration curves IntCal13 and SHCal13, providing increased confidence in the correlation of global paleorecords.
This work was part funded by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (FRST)—now Ministry for Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE)-PROP-20224-SFK-UOA), a Royal Society of New Zealand grant, the Australian Research Council (FL100100195 and DP0664898) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/H009922/1, NE/I007660/1, NER/A/S/2001/01037 and NE/H007865/1).