Luminescence chronology of loess-palaeosol deposits in the Central Shandong Mountains region: Provenances and paleoclimate implications

The loess-palaeosol deposits of the Central Shandong Mountains (CSM) to the east of the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP) potentially provide valuable archives for the reconstruction of East Asian monsoon patterns. However, compared to the abundant attention given to the loess layer, fewer studies have explored the palaeosols documenting the processes and characteristics of interglacial climate changes. The high-resolution chronologies and provenances of the palaeosol in the CSM area are still unclear. In this work, the luminescence ages and paleoclimate proxies in the Shaozhuang (SZ) and Focun (FC) sections were studied, by combining detrital zircons U–Pb ages from the loess-palaesosol in Jingbian, Licheng, Focun, Pianguan and Dongming Yellow River sediments. Quartz single-aliquot regenerative dose protocol (SAR) and K-feldspar post-infrared IRSL (pIRIR290) dating results were obtained in the SZ (8.0 ± 1.1 ka −50.8 ± 2.7 ka) and FC (3.8 ± 0.3 ka—144.0 ± 7.8 ka) sections to develop the most detailed CSM region chronologies to date. The analyzed grain sizes and detrital zircon U–Pb ages suggest that the provenance of the CSM loess was dominated by local Yellow River sediments. The palaeosols observed in the field in these two sections were composed of both aggradation soils deposited in the interglacial period and non-aggradation soil formed by the weathering and leaching of the underlying loess. We found evidences for the presence of non-aggradation soils as indicated the relatively high 5–16 μm particle percentages, relatively low chemical index of alteration (CIA) values and the percentages of >63 μm particles compared to those of the overlying palaeosol layers. Nevertheless, the loess-palaeosol deposits in the CSM are still the product of the East Asian monsoon and global climatic variations, as the deposits have recorded the glacial-interglacial cycles.