Vedde Ash layer discovered in a small lake basin on the Scottish mainland

Abstract

A thin layer of micro-tephra particles has been discovered in a lake sediment sequence from Sutherland, Scotland. The tephra is attributed to the Vedde Ash on the basis of ash geochemistry. The Vedde Ash, which has been dated to c. 10 300 radiocarbon years BP and which was thus deposited during the Younger Dryas chronozone, has previously been reported from lake sequences in Norway, from sediment cores from the NE North Atlantic and from Greenland ice cores, but this is the first reported record from the British mainland. It is likely that this ash layer also occurs in other lake sediment sequences in northern Britain, thus providing the potential for more precise correlations of Younger Dryas sequences than has hitherto been the case. The way in which correlation by tephrochronology may revolutionize approaches to reconstructing the sequence of events in theNE Atlantic region during the last glacial-interglacial transition is briefly considered.