Sediment Dating of Fluvial, Lacustrine and Aeolian Systems in the Basin of the great Lakes, Western Mongolia

Luminescence and radiocarbon dating methods are mandatory to set up reliable chronological frameworks for sedimentary systems to reconstruct climate and environmental changes quantitatively through time. Our study area, the Basin of the Great Lakes in Western Mongolia is a key area to investigate sediment archives and sediment pathways under variable climates in this region including extreme continental climatic conditions.  Alluvial fans, beach bars and dune fields, partly interacting with each other, were sampled for luminescence dating in detail. In this study, a total of thirty-four samples were taken from a beach ridge sequence of Khyargas Nuur and tested using K-feldspar single aliquot (2.5 mm) pIRIR dating to overcome the problem of the dim signal of quartz. Furthermore, single grain dating was also conducted to address the problem of insufficient bleaching of the pIRIR signals. The preliminary established chronological framework indicates that the studied samples were mostly deposited during the Holocene and the results yielded a continuous decline of the lake level for most of the Holocene period.