Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy

You are in:  Home » Working Groups » Holocene

WORKING GROUP ON THE BASE OF THE HOLOCENE

A Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy and of the INTIMATE (Integration of Ice-core, Marine and Terrestrial Records) Group of the INQUA Palaeoclimate Commission

The Holocene GSSP was formally accepted and ratified by IUGS in May 2008.

Download; voting details, confirmation letter from IUGS.

The visual stratigraphy of the NGRIP core between 1491.6 and 1493.25 m depth obtained using a digital line scanner (Svensson et al., 2005). In this photograph, the image is 'reversed' so that clear ice shows up black, whereas the cloudy bands, which contain relatively large quantities of impurities, in particular micrometer-sized dust particles from dry area in eastern Asia, appear white. The visual stratigraphy is essentially a seasonal signal and reveals annual banding in the ice. The location of the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary at 1492.45 m is shown in the enlarged lower image. A core break occurs at a depth of 1492.32 m. The ice core is complete and continuous across the core break, but the visual stratigraphy scanning image is disturbed by the break and has thus been masked out (photograph by Sune Rasmussen). Click on image to see enlarged version.

Full details are published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, issue 1 2009.

View abstract.

Composition of the Working Group

Chairman: Mike Walker (UK):
INQUA: John Lowe (UK)
INTIMATE Convenor: Wim Hoek (The Netherlands)

SQS representative: Phil Gibbard (UK)

Ice core community:

NorthGRIP: Sigfus Johnsen (Denmark)
Jørgen-Peder Steffensen (Denmark)

Trevor Popp (USA)

Antarctica: Jakob Schwander (Switzerland)

Oceanographical community: Konrad Hughen (USA)
John Andrews (USA)

Dendrochronological community: Bernd Kromer (Germany)

Terrestrial community:

Europe: Thomas Litt (Germany)
North America: Les Cwynar (Canada)
Asia: Takeshi Nakagawa (Japan)
Australasia: Peter Kershaw (Australia), David J. Lowe (New Zealand)
Rewi Newnham (New Zealand)