Radiocarbon measurements on tree rings (7220-7122 BCE and 5300-5190 BCE)

DOI

Accelerator mass spectrometer measurement results of C14 age in tree rings from 13 different dendrochronoligically dated trees from Ireland and the Alps, United states and Siberia, spanning from 7220-7122 BCE and 5300-5190 BCE.The Sun sporadically produces eruptive events leading to intense fluxes of solar energetic particles (SEPs) that dramatically disrupt the near-Earth radiation environment. Such events have been directly studied for the last decades but little is known about the occurrence and magnitude of rare, extreme SEP events. Presently, a few events that produced measurable signals in cosmogenic radionuclides such as 14C, 10Be and 36Cl have been found. Analyzing annual 14C concentrations in tree-rings from Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, Russia, and the USA we discovered two spikes in atmospheric 14C corresponding to 7176 and 5259 BCE. The ~2% increases of atmospheric 14C recorded for both events exceed all previously known 14C peaks but after correction for the geomagnetic field, they are comparable to the largest event of this type discovered so far at 775 CE. These strong events serve as accurate time markers for the synchronization with floating tree-ring and ice core records and provide critical information on the previous occurrence of extreme solar events which threaten modern infrastructure.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.941472
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.941472
Provenance
Creator Brehm, Nicolas ORCID logo; Christl, Marcus ORCID logo; Knowles, Timothy ORCID logo; Casanova, Emanuelle; Everhed, Richard; Adolphi, Florian ORCID logo; Muscheler, Raimund ORCID logo; Synal, Hans-Arno ORCID logo; Mekhaldi, Florian ORCID logo; Paleari, Chiara Ileana; Leuschner, Hanns Hubert; Bayliss, Alex ORCID logo; Nicolussi, Kurt ORCID logo; Pilcher, Thomas; Pearson, Charlotte; Salzer, Matthew W ORCID logo; Fonti, Patrick ORCID logo; Nievergelt, Daniel; Hantmirov, Rashit; Brown, David J ORCID logo; Usoskin, Ilya; Wacker, Lukas ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2022
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Publication Series of Datasets; Collection
Format application/zip
Size 11 datasets
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-118.170W, 38.380S, 70.060E, 67.750N)