Sedimentary record of a late Holocene storm event in Laizhou Bay, Bohai Sea, China

The Bohai Sea is influenced by numerous extreme oceanic wave events in history. However, it is often difficult to determine the types of these events due to the lack of detailed historical records, causing uncertainty in the reconstruction of historical coastal disasters. We investigated an anomalous sand layer in the Xiliyu Village by the coast of Laizhou Bay, Shandong, from which an extreme event deposit was identified using a multi-proxy approach including grain size distribution, geochemistry, and magnetic susceptibility. This event was dated 2 700–3 100 a bp, and caused inundation of a large coastal area of Laizhou Bay. By comparing historical records with instrumental data, we believe that the event deposit was generated by a severe storm surge with wind speed of >34.9 m/s.