Influence of periglacial cover beds on in situ-produced cosmogenic 10Be in soil sections

Abstract

Cover beds, widespread on hillslopes of temperate climate zones, represent layers of allochthonous material laterally transported by periglacial processes during the Late Pleistocene. Two soil sections comprised of cover beds from the Bavarian Forest, SE Germany, have been analysed for in situ-produced cosmogenic 10 Be. Major changes in the nuclide concentration agree well with soil section boundaries defined by field observations and grain size analyses. Numeric modeling of these cosmogenic nuclide sections demonstrates that simple continuous erosion and regolith mixing models fail to explain the measured nuclide concentrations. Instead, the measured data can be best described by modeling an admixture of material such as loess or reworked allochthonous material, which have different nuclide concentrations. A comparison of cosmogenic nuclide concentrations from the two cover bed sections with concentrations from river bedload sediments of the Regen catchment reveals that cover bed formation might affect the result of basin-wide erosion rate determinations based on cosmogenic nuclides. Nuclide concentration of river bedload is potentially a binary mixture produced by (1) spatial erosion of the soil surfaces; and (2) spatially nonuniform incision into deep cover bed layers that contributes sediment low in nuclide concentration.