Roadmap for Loess/Paleosol Magnetism After 30 Years of Experience

Abstract:

Over the last 30 years, loess and paleosol deposits have provided the scientific community a unique opportunity to study past climate and environmental change of the continents. Fluctuating magnetic susceptibility of glacial loess and interglacial soil deposits in China, and a few places elsewhere, have been correlated with the marine isotope stages and ice core records, illustrating the loess-climate connection. Furthermore, the logarithm of the magnetic susceptibility and other ferrimagnetism dependant concentration parameters in modern topsoil are found to be linearly related to modern rainfall records. But, the transfer function is site specific. Others have suggested that the relationship is more universal if precipitation and evapotranspiration are considered together. This said, major roadblocks remain for loess/paleosol magnetism to reach its full potential as a quantitative tool in climate and environmental studies. Reaching this full potential is impaired primarily because of the difficulty in identifying iron oxides and oxyhydroxides other than magnetite or maghemite in natural samples and (semi-)quantifying their concentration and grain size. This talk will present results obtained recently through research targeting loess and paleosol magnetism emphasising the need to further consider the following scientific questions. Which environmental and climate variables cause the change in magnetism in soils? How does magnetism evolve with time, quantitatively, when soils are buried under newly deposited loess and become paleosols? Can we overcome the imprecision of paleomagnetic dating inherent to our poor understanding of the magnetization acquisition process in loess and soils?