Abstract
DISPUTE over the correlation of the last interglacial event in deep-sea cores with the corresponding shoreline feature on islands preserving fossil coral terraces has become a fundamental stumbling-block to progress in Pleistocene geochronology. If polled independently most scientists working in this area would agree that the last interglacial event is clearly recorded in their own data, yet the problem of precise correlation among the various types of data has remained the subject of controversy for the past eight years1–8. By making oxygen isotope determinations in molluscs collected from the Late Pleistocene coral terraces in Barbados, we have directly correlated these terraces with the oxygen isotope stratigraphic record of deep-sea cores, and have established that Barbados terraces I, II, and III (ages 82,000, 105,000 and 125,000 yr BP) were all formed during stage 5 of the standard oxygen isotope stratigraphy.
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SHACKLETON, N., MATTHEWS, R. Oxygen isotope stratigraphy of Late Pleistocene coral terraces in Barbados. Nature 268, 618–620 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1038/268618a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/268618a0
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