hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
The hydrological change plays a vital role in regulating Earth's surface systems. However, understanding past hydrological variations on land is hindered by difficulties in dating and correlating continental strata, and the perceived incompleteness of terrestrial sedimentary successions. Here, we calibrate the astronomical time scale of an Upper Triassic lake sediment succession at St. Audrie's Bay (UK) using recently proposed statistical tuning approaches. A novel statistical completeness evaluation confirms that an optimal correlation of the astronomically calibrated Upper Triassic magnetostratigraphy can be determined between St. Audrie's Bay and well-studied reference sections in the Newark Basin (USA) and Jameson Land Basin (Greenland). Reconstructed lake level changes at St. Audrie's Bay were in-phase with those in the Newark Basin (deposited at a similar tropical paleolatitude), but in anti-phase with those in the high-latitude Jameson Land Basin – a pattern also supported by paleoclimate modeling. A ∼1.8 million-year cyclicity paced hydrological changes in these basins, and represents the fingerprint of chaotic behavior of the Solar System.
