Late Pleistocene aeolian activity in Haitan Island, Southeast China: Insights from optically stimulated luminescence dating of coastal dunes on marine terraces

The 'Old Red Sand' is a type of semicemented medium-fine sandy sediment that is red(10R_4/8) or brown red(2.5YR_4/8) in colour and is found in late Quaternary deposits. The sediments have distinctive characteristics and are a critical archive for understanding climatic changes in the coastal areas of East Asia. The ages of the late Quaternary aeolian sand dunes from Haitan Island in the coastal area of South China are still in debate. In this study, three sets of marine terraces were identified in the northern region of Haitan Island. Aeolian dune sands are well preserved on the top of these terraces. Quartz Optically Stimulated Luminescence dating and the distribution of the formation ages demonstrated that the palaeo-dunes are deposits from the middle-late period of the Late Pleistocene(Q_3^(2-3)). The period may be divided into three stages, 100-90 ka, 70-60 ka, and 40-20 ka, in which the palaeo-dunes of the first two stages are more widespread and were formed separately during a low-sea level period of the Marine Isotope Stages 5 b and 4. Several depositional palaeo-flood event records were preserved during the last stage due to the increasing gradient of mountain gullies formed during the Last Glacial Maximum.

Heavy metal pollution in tidal zones of Bohai Bay using the dated sediment cores

Three sediment cores were collected in November 2003 from Dagu estuary to Qikou estuary. The main polluted heavy metals in the sediment of tidal zones for the Bohai Bay have been found by analyzing the relationship among the contents of heavy metals, the contents of geochemical elements （Fe, AI and Mn） and the size of grain. The dominating contaminative elements in tidal sediments of Bohai Bay are Pb, Zn and Cd. Their contents are higher than the corresponding upper limit of environmental background values and they have very faint correlation with the corresponding contents of geochemical elements and the size of grain, indicating the anthropogenic enrichment. Especially, the preliminary study on the pollution sources and the history of heavy metals in the Dagu estuary has been done using the dated results. The contamination by Zn and Cd also started in the middle 1950s, while the contamination by Pb appeared in the early 1940s. The pollution by Zn and Cd mainly originate from sewage discharge, while the pollution by Pb has many sources, like atmosphere deposition and industrial discharRe.

Global correlation for strontium isotope curve in the Late Cretaceous of Tibet and dating marine sediments

^(87)Sr/^(86)Sr ratios of marine carbonate samples collected from a sedimentary section of the Late Cretaceous in the south of Tibet were measured.Based on the absence of cathodoluminescence and a very low Mn/Sr ratio(average 0.06)of the samples,it is thought that they contain information on the original seawater strontium isotope composition.The strontium isotope evolution curve of the Late Cretaceous in Tibet we established here,is consistent with other coeval curves from Europe,North America and Antarctica,supports the notion that the strontium isotope composition of seawater is governed by global events,which provides a new approach for the inter-continental and inter-basinal correlations of Late Cretaceous in the area and is a complementarity for biostratigraphy.In addition,we attempt to determine the age of the boundaries for Campanian/Santonian and Maastrichtian/Campanian by ^(87)Sr/^(86)Sr ratios for Gamba section in southern Tibet.The two boundaries are located in the thickness of 217 m(83.5 Ma)and 291 m(71.3 Ma),respectively.