Mid- Holocene stable isotope records (ẟ18O and ẟ13C) of speleothem VEAJ from Alfredo Jahn Cave, northern Venezuela

DOI

The stable isotope records for mid- and late- Holocene are based on two stalagmites, VEAJ collected in Alfredo Jahn cave and VECA collected in Caripe Cave, respectively. Both caves are located in northern Venezuela, adjacent to Cariaco Basin. The ẟ18O record was interpreted as a proxy for the proximity of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) to our study sites, and the ẟ13C record as a proxy for vegetation changes, as discussed in the paper 'Atlantic ITCZ variability during the Holocene based on high-resolution speleothem isotope records from northern Venezuela' (Medina et al., 2023). The ẟ18O and ẟ13C analyses were performed at the Stable Isotope Laboratory at the Institute of Geoscience of the University of São Paulo (Brazil) using a Thermo-Finnigan Delta Plus Advantage mass spectrometer. ẟ-notation in per mil units (‰) was used to express the sample isotopic ratios deviation from the Vienna Pee Dee Belemnite (VPDB) standard. Approximately 200 μg of CaCO3-powder subsamples for ẟ18O and ẟ13C stable isotopic analyses were collected using a manually controlled Sherline 5400 milling at a resolution of 0.4 mm for VEAJ and 0.5 mm for VECA. The ẟ18O and ẟ13C isotopic profiles of VEAJ-base, VEAJ-top left and VEAJ-top right are based on 530, 310 and 250 samples, respectively. VECA isotopic profiles consist of 670 samples. Since VEAJ-top left overlaps with some sections of the -top right record, we merged them through normalization (i.e., by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation) of the data inside the overlapping period, averaging both series and then reconstructing the shorter time series with the mean and standard deviation of the longer one. The geochronology was established by means of the U/Th dating method, using a multicollector inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometers (MC-ICP-MS-Thermo-Finnigan NEPTUNE) at the Institute of Global Environmental Change, Xi'an Jiaotong University (China). The sampling for the U/Th dating was performed by extracting ~0.100 g of powdered carbonate with a handheld drill of the least porous and colored, most traceable layers along or at the side of each speleothem growth axis. A total of 42 U/Th ages were used to construct the age model for VEAJ and 25 for VECA, yielding an mean temporal stable isotope sampling resolutions of 3 and 23 years for VEAJ-base & top-composite, respectively, and 1.5 years for VECA. Some age reversals along the stalagmites were flagged as outliers using Bayesian statistics, and consequently removed from the age models. For other age inversions, an iterative procedure was applied to increase the range of uncertainty in order to fulfill the monotonicity criterion (Scholz and Hoffmann, 2011).

The two different distance columns correspond to the sampling depths for the two adjacent stalagmites: the top left (VEAJ-top left) and top right (VEAJ-top right), that grew on the top of the lower section (VEAJ-base).

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.962586
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.962591
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2023.108056
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quageo.2011.02.002
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.962586
Provenance
Creator M Medina, N Melissa ORCID logo; Cruz, Francisco William ORCID logo; Winter, Amos ORCID logo; Zhang, Haiwei ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2023
Funding Reference National Science Foundation https://doi.org/10.13039/100000001 Crossref Funder ID 1743738 https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1743738 PIRE: Climate Research Education in the Americas Using Tree-Ring and Cave Sediment Examples (PIRE-CREATE); Sao Paulo Research Foundation https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001807 Crossref Funder ID 2017/50085-3 PIRE-CREATE project; Sao Paulo Research Foundation https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001807 Crossref Funder ID 2019/16745-1 ; Sao Paulo Research Foundation https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001807 Crossref Funder ID 2019/25179-0
Rights Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 2562 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-66.273 LON, 10.479 LAT); Alfredo Jahn cave