Paleosecular variations refining the chronology of the sediments from the Pearl River Delta, southern China.

A high-resolution paleosecular variations record since ~6 kyr, including direction and relative intensity, was derived from the Pearl River delta (PRD) sediments in southern China constrained by the radiocarbon ages in this paper. The comparison of both direction and relative intensity with other adjacent records confirmed that the non-dipole field has common fluctuations in the centennial to millennial timescales. This pattern provides some profound tied points to correlate the sediment sequence in the different deposition environments. The significant age offsets of the similar secular variation features between the different records corroborate the radiocarbon errors in dating the sediments. This work further showed that the geomagnetic secular variations can serve as an effective tool to determine the sediments’ age and correlate the stratigraphy for the different deposition environments in a wide region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]