Optical dating of aeolian dynamism on the West African Sahelian margin

Abstract

The Sahelian Margin of West Africa is widely recognised as an area of recent environmental catastrophe and human suffering arising from food shortage and land degradation associated with prolonged drought. The propensity of this region to suffer drought has been related, using environmental data collected during the period of instrumental records, to a combination of low mean annual rainfall levels and a high degree of rainfall variability which relates to sea surface temperature anomalies in the adjacent tropical Atlantic Ocean. Despite the significant environmental and human consequences of such droughts, there is a paucity of long-term environmental data for the West African Sahel. Aeolian dune reactivations in this area are a potentially highly useful environmental archive of past periods of extended drought conditions, which may have resulted in localised or widespread dune reactivation. Here we describe the initial results from an ongoing programme of research, which seeks to develop a detailed record of past dune reactivations in Mali. We find evidence for repeated Holocene dune reactivation events and a significant number of reactivations, which commenced at the time of onset of the last major drought cycle in the early 1970s. We obtain ages as young as 20–30 years for some significant dune units (thickness up to 1 m) and describe the results of experiments which test the performance of our dating exercise. We specifically test for the significance of preheat temperature on single aliquot regeneration (SAR) equivalent dose determinations and recycling ratios; neither are found vary significantly as a function of preheating. Optical dating of sand sized quartz could provide a useful tool for palaeogeographical mapping of ancient and historical dune reactivations in this region and elsewhere.