A comment about "A sedimentary record from the Makarov Basin, Arctic Ocean, reveals changing middle to Late Pleistocene glaciation patterns" (Quat. Sci. Rev., 270 (2021), p. 107176) from W. Xiao, L. Polyak, R. Wang, C. Not, L. Dong, Y. Liu, T. Ma, T. Zhang

Abstract

Xiao et al. (2021) propose a climatostratigraphy of the Arctic Ocean built from a Mn-based cyclostratigraphy of deep sediments tuned to stack marine isotope stratigraphy that was proposed by Jakobsson and others in 2000. This cyclostratigraphy led to infer relatively high sedimentation rates in the central Arctic Ocean during the last glacial/interglacial cycles. It however required a reinterpretation of the magnetostratigraphy by inferring long-duration reversals during the Brunhes epoch. It also bypassed chronological constraints from U-series isotopes data. More recent papers based notably on the decay of U-series isotopes in sedimentary sequences, invalidate the chronology of the Mn-based cyclostratigraphy but confirm earlier works. This revised chronostratigraphy, in accordance with that of pre-2000 papers, points to much lower sedimentation rate estimates. It leads to drastically distinct climatostratigraphic inferences, as illustrated in the present comment from a tentative re-interpretation of the Xiao et al.’s data.