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Driven by glacio-eustatic processes, the Earth has experienced a phase of large-amplitude sea-level change as intensive as any during its history since the Quaternary (Rohling et al., 2014), which has branded profound imprints in marine sediments. For example, with regard to deep-sea sediments, a remarkable feature is the variations in the oxygen isotope records of benthic foraminifera (BF), such as the well-known "LR04 stack" (Lisiecki & Raymo, 2005). Likewise, for sedimentary records on continental shelves, which serve as a link between the land and the deep ocean, sea-level fluctuations over glacial-interglacial timescales (e.g., the cycles in the Earth's orbital eccentricity of ∼100-kyr) are generally expressed as transgression-regression cycles (Shi et al., 2016). Due to their wide and gentle landforms, as well as relatively shallow water depths, continental shelves are much more sensitive to sea-level changes than abyssal regions; even trifling fluctuations in sea-level can give rise to considerable shoreline migration (Yao et al., 2020). Nevertheless, besides the easily identified transgression-regression cycles, it is difficult to trace changes in sea-level over much shorter timescales, which, however, is of great significance to human activities in coastal areas (Yang et al., 2015). This problem is more prominent in relation to sedimentary units with homogenous lithologies, especially for fine-grained sediments which are relatively poor in BF due to high sedimentation rates and

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