~5.9 cal ka bp Towada‐Chuseri tephra from Towada volcano: a mid‐Holocene marker layer from Japan to northeast China

Abstract

Far‐travelled ash layers from explosive volcanic eruptions can provide invaluable marker horizons for dating and correlating regional to global sedimentary archives. Here, we present a new cryptotephra associated with the ~5.9 cal ka bp Towada‐Chuseri eruption (To‐Cu) in a peat sediment record from northeast China. This tephra exhibits a rhyolitic glass composition that can be distinguished from other widespread tephra layers around the region of Japan and northeast China. Our findings extend the known range of this ash significantly, making it now traceable about 1200 km from its source, Towada volcano, Japan. Notably, this tephra provides an important isochron for synchronising palaeoenvironmental studies during the mid‐Holocene period from the western Pacific, central Japan, Japan Sea and northeast China.

Holocene Tephrostratigraphy in the East Sea/Japan Sea: Implications for Eruptive History of Ulleungdo Volcano and Potential for Hemispheric Synchronization of Sedimentary Archives

“…Previous visible tephra studies have shown that their dispersals do not overlap in the East Sea region (Figure 1; Machida, 1999; Machida & Arai, 2003). Our cryptotephra results, however, demonstrate that these important markers are actually co‐registered in the marine record, thus updating the information in the East Asian Holocene tephra framework (Chen et al., 2020) like other studies (e.g., Sun, Plunkett, et al., 2021, Sun, Wang, et al., 2021; Chen et al., 2022). Importantly, these new findings have significant implications, as the mid‐latitude marine archive is now able to be integrated with records in northern high‐latitudes and the tropics simultaneously (Figure 8).…”