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Amino‐acid geochronology and the British Pleistocene: secure stratigraphical framework or a case of circular reasoning?
Author(s) -
McCarroll Danny
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
journal of quaternary science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.142
H-Index - 94
eISSN - 1099-1417
pISSN - 0267-8179
DOI - 10.1002/jqs.690
Subject(s) - interglacial , geochronology , isotopes of oxygen , geology , pleistocene , quaternary , yield (engineering) , paleontology , isotope , glacial period , range (aeronautics) , geochemistry , thermodynamics , materials science , physics , quantum mechanics , composite material
Aminostratigraphy is central to the recently revised correlation of Quaternary deposits in the British Isles, providing a link between terrestrial deposits and marine Oxygen Isotope Stages. The central tenet of British aminostratigraphy, however, that shells from the same interglacial yield very similar ratios, so that the characteristic ratios from different interglacials are distinct, remains uncertain. The data available suggest that amino‐acid ratios from different interglacials do not fall into discrete groups, but overlap considerably. It is therefore not valid to assign individual shells to Oxygen Isotope Stages simply on the basis of their amino‐acid ratios, which means that filtering data to remove high or low values, on the assumption that they represent reworked shells, is unacceptable. The range of ‘characteristic ratios’ assigned to British warm stages may have been underestimated and the degree of separation between them overestimated. Amino‐acid ratios should be treated as sample data that are naturally variable. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.