Luminescence dating of the MIS 6 glaciation of the Pamir mountains (Central Asia)
Efimova M.O. Deev E.V. Taratunina N.A. Buylaert J.-P. Sosin P.M. Panin A.V. Murray A.S. Schneider R. Lukyanycheva M.S. Tokareva O.A. Meshcheryakova O.A. Kurbanov R.N.
August 2024Elsevier B.V.
Quaternary Geochronology
2024#83
The Pamir Mountains are one of the highest mountain systems in the world; they act as sources of fresh water for the main rivers of Central Asia: the Amudaria and Syrdaria. Throughout the Quaternary, the Pamirs played a major role in controlling atmospheric circulation and land-surface processes, and provided great volumes of terrigenous sediments for transport by large rivers to the depressions in the Aral and Caspian regions. These ultimately provided broad aeolian cover in the sandy deserts, and finer dust for the widely distributed loess-palaeosol sequences. The glaciation history of this highly dynamic region provides an important basis for understanding climate change, sediment source and landscape evolution in Central Asia during the Quaternary. The question of the number, distribution, extent and timing of Pleistocene glaciations in the Pamir is debated. One of the main obstacles to research, together with difficulties of access and severity of current climate, is the varying degree of preservation of traces of previous glaciations in the western and eastern Pamir. As a result of a geological survey, we for the first time identified a thick lacustrine deposit at high altitudes in a tributary of the Panj – the valley of the Sary-Shitharv River – this records the damming of the Panj River valley by a large glacier. Luminescence measurements were undertaken to obtain the age of the Sary-Shitharv glacially-dammed lake. As often in mountain catchments the quartz OSL signal was unsuitable for dose estimation, and so the chronology of the Sary-Shitharv section is based entirely on post-IR IRSL signals from K-rich feldspar. We used pIRIR50,290 and pIRIR200,290 protocols and obtained indistinguishable ages from both protocols. Given the high sedimentation rates deduced from the structure of lacustrine deposits, the entire sequence must have been accumulated rather quickly, over a period of no more than a few thousand years. The average age over the whole series of dates is 165 ± 11 ka. This places the existence of the glacially-dammed lake at Sary-Shitharv in late MIS 6, a result that fits well with the general course of the glacial history of the Pamirs.
Climate change , Geochronology , Glaciations , High Asia , Late quaternary , Proglacial lake , Shakhdara range
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Institute of Water Problems, Hydropower and Ecology, NAST, Dushanbe, Tajikistan
Institute of Geography, National Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan, Alma-Aty, Kazakhstan
Department of Physics, Technical University of Denmark, Roskilde, Denmark
Nordic Laboratory for Luminescence Dating, DTU Physics and Department of Geoscience, Aarhus University, Roskilde, Denmark
Uppsala University, Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden
Institute of Archaeology, Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences, Baku, Azerbaijan
Gorgan University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, Gorgan, Iran
Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
Institute of Water Problems
Institute of Geography
Department of Physics
Nordic Laboratory for Luminescence Dating
Uppsala University
Institute of Archaeology
Gorgan University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources
Nanjing University
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