Presented are analytical data from lacustrine sediment cores, retrieved from Lake Nam Co (Tibetan Plateau). The sediment core is a composite of one gravity core, taken with a Rumohr-Meischner gravity corer (63 mm diameter) and a piston core, retrieved using an uwitec piston coring system (http://www.uwitec.at; 90 mm diameter). The composite core labelled comprises a total length of 10.378 m. The cores were obtained at N 30.737417, E 090.790333 at a water depth of 93 m on 2008-09-15. The purpose of obtaining this sediment core was to establish a high-resolution record of climate (monsoonal) and environmental change using multiple proxy data. The dataset comprises analytical data based on sedimentological, inorganic geochemical, mineralogical and isotope-geochemical methods. Specifically: sediment water content & density; magnetic susceptibility; particel size data; quantitative inorganic geochemical data (ICP-OES aqua regia and HCL digestions); semi-quantitative XRF elemental data; carbon, nitrogen, sulfur contents; qualitative mineralogical data; bulk sediment stable carbon and oxygen isotope data.

The XRF-data were obtained during November 2008 to collect semi-quantitative elemental data using an ITRAX XRF-core scanner (Cox Analytical Systems; Molndal, Sweden) at cologne university (Germany). The scanner used a Mo-tube as X-ray source, a voltage of 50 kV, a current of 35 mA and an exposure time of 20 s at a measuring interval of 2 mm. During measurements, the core-halves were covered with an ultra-thin and highly conductive film ("SpectroCertified® thin-film sample supports Ultra-Polyester film"; Chemplex Industries Inc.; Palm City, USA). Data are given in raw 'peak area (pa)' format. From these raw data 'centered log ratios (clr)' were calculated (Weltje & Tjallingii 2008). On these data a linear regression was used to further detrend the data.