Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

varve: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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varve1 CONSTRUCTVarve coupletDE GEER · ANNUAL LAYER

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Geology (sedimentology)

An annual sediment couplet used to count elapsed years

The Swedish geologist Gerard De Geer introduced varve counting in his 1912 paper A geochronology of the last 12,000 years, adapting the Swedish word varv (a layer or turn) for the paired light and dark bands he traced in glacial lake clays. Each couplet records one year of deposition: a coarse, pale layer dropped by fast summer meltwater and a fine, dark layer that settles slowly through the still winter, so counting couplets counts elapsed years. By matching patterns of couplet thickness from site to site, De Geer assembled an absolute yearly timescale reaching back through the retreat of the last ice sheets, founding the method now called varve chronology. Later work, reviewed by Zolitschka and colleagues in 2015 and by Ojala and colleagues in 2012, extended the approach to organic and calcite couplets in many lake settings and paired varve counts with radiocarbon and other independent dating to test the counts. A varve is distinctive as a natural annual clock read directly from sediment: rather than estimating age from radioactive decay, each couplet is a directly countable calendar year, and unbroken varve records can span tens of thousands of years.[1][2][3]

Unit
One paired sediment couplet, a light layer plus a dark layer, equal to a single year
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified and counted in sediment cores by microscopy and imaging, and cross-checked against radiocarbon and other independent dating

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Nearby constructs

sedimentation3 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, three constructsabsolute2 fields · 2 citationsjingle · one word, two constructs

References

  1. De Geer, G. (1912). A geochronology of the last 12,000 years. In Compte rendu de la 11e session du Congrès géologique international, Stockholm 1910 (Vol. 1, pp. 241–253).
  2. Zolitschka, B., Francus, P., Ojala, A. E. K., & Schimmelmann, A. (2015). Varves in lake sediments – a review. Quaternary Science Reviews, 117, 1–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2015.03.019
  3. Ojala, A. E. K., Francus, P., Zolitschka, B., Besonen, M., & Lamoureux, S. F. (2012). Characteristics of sedimentary varve chronologies – A review. Quaternary Science Reviews, 43, 45–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.04.006

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