The deposits in Cumberland Bone Cave (Allegany County, Maryland) preserved one of the most taxonomically diverse pre-radiocarbon Pleistocene faunas in the northeastern United States. The site has long been recognized as an important record of Pleistocene life in the region, but numerical age control for the fauna was never developed, and hypotheses for its age have been based upon biochronological assessments of the mammalian fauna. We used fossil teeth and preserved sediment housed in museum collections to obtain the first numerical age assessment of the fauna from Cumberland Bone Cave. Coupled U-series Electron Spin Resonance (US-ESR) was used to date fossil molars of the extinct peccary, Platygonus sp. The age estimates of two teeth gave ages of 722 ± 64 and 790 ± 53 ka. Our results are supported by previously unpublished paleomagnetic data generated by the late John Guilday, and by plotting length-width of the first molar (m1) of Ondatra (muskrats) from Cumberland Bone Cave on the chronocline of Ondatra molar evolution in North America. Our age assessments are surprisingly close to the age estimate previously proposed by Charles Repenning, who based his age on a somewhat complicated model of speciation and morphotype evolution among arvicoline rodents.

Immature and mature calcretes from an alluvial terrace sequence in the Sorbas basin, southeast Spain, were dated by the U-series isochron technique. The immature horizons consistently produced statistically reliable ages of high precision. The mature horizons typically produced statistically unreliable ages but, because of linear trends in the dataset and low errors associated with each data point, it was still possible to place a best-fit isochron through the dataset to produce an age with low associated uncertainties. It is, however, only possible to prove that these statistically unreliable ages have geochronological significance if multiple isochron ages are produced for a single site, and if these multiple ages are stratigraphically consistent. The geochronological significance of such ages can be further proven if at least one of the multiple ages is statistically reliable. By using this technique to date calcretes that have formed during terrace aggradation and at the terrace surface after terrace abandonment it is possible not only to date the timing of terrace aggradation but also to constrain the age at which the river switched from aggradation to incision. This approach, therefore, constrains the timing of changes in fluvial processes more reliably than any currently used geochronological procedure and is appropriate for dating terrace sequences in dryland regions worldwide, wherever calcrete horizons are present.

Wet climatic episodes are known to have prevailed in the Egyptian Sahara several times during the late Quaternary, most recently during the Holocene 8000 yr ago. Earlier wet episodes have been recognized as having occurred during the past 300,000 yr and have been dated by U-series methods in speleothems and in lake travertines. We show here that the times of enhanced groundwater movement can also be determined by 230Th/234U dating of secondary U in ores of uranium, iron, and phosphate. We also present evidence that such acceleration of groundwater movements is indicated by relatively low 234U/238U activity ratios in the secondary uranium. Our new data show that pluvial periods in Egypt occurred during marine oxygen isotope stages 4, 5, 6, and 7 and therefore are consistent with the view that the wet episodes are the results of migration of the tropical monsoonal belt driven primarily by the 23,000-yr precession cycle of the Milankovich curve, modulated by the 100,000-yr eccentricity cycle.

Coral microatolls have been long used as precise indicators of past sea level, but their use for precise definition of detailed sea-level fluctuations is still rare. Here we report twelve high-precision thermal ionization mass spectrometric 230Th ages for twelve rims of five mid-Holocene microatolls from an emerged reef terrace at Leizhou Peninsula, northern South China Sea. This is a tectonically stable area, enabling us to reconstruct both the timing and trajectory of local sea-level fluctuations accurately. The elevations of these microatoll rims and cores were accurately determined relative to the surface of modern living microatolls at the same site. The results indicate that the sea level during the period of 7050–6600 yr bp (years before AD 1950) was about 171 to 219 cm above the present, with at least four cycles of fluctuations. Over this 450 yr interval, sea level fluctuated by 20–40 cm on century scales.

Reliable and precise ages of Quaternary pedogenic carbonate can be obtained with 230Th/U dating by thermal ionization mass spectrometry applied to carefully selected milligram-size samples. Datable carbonate can form within a few thousand years of surface stabilization allowing ages of Quaternary deposits and surfaces to be closely estimated. Pedogenic carbonate clast-rinds from gravels of glacio-fluvial terraces in the Wind River Basin have median concentrations of 14 ppm U and 0.07 ppm 232Th, with median (230Th/232Th) = 270, making them well suited for 230Th/U dating. Horizons as thin as 0.5 mm were sampled from polished slabs to reduce averaging of long (≥105 yr), and sometimes visibly discontinuous, depositional histories. Dense, translucent samples with finite 230Th/U ages preserve within-rind stratigraphic order in all cases. Ages for terraces WR4 (167,000 ± 6,400 yr) and WR2 (55,000 ± 8600 yr) indicate a mean incision rate of 0.26 ± 0.05 m per thousand years for the Wind River over the past glacial cycle, slower than inferred from cosmogenic-nuclide dating. Terrace WR3, which formed penecontemporaneously with the final maximum glacial advance of the penultimate Rocky Mountain (Bull Lake) glaciation, has an age of 150,000 ± 8300 yr indicating that it is broadly synchronous with the penultimate global ice volume maximum.

To better understand how fluvial systems respond to late Quaternary climatic forcing OSL and U-series dating was applied to stratigraphically significant sedimentary units within a small (<6.5 km2) alluvial fan system (the Sphakia fan) in southwest Crete. The resultant chronology (comprising 32 OSL and U-series ages) makes Sphakia fan one of the best dated systems in the Mediterranean and suggests that Cretan fans responded to climate in two ways. First, during the transitions between Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5a/4 and MIS 2/1 Sphakia fan was characterised by significant entrenchment and distal shift in the zone of deposition. It is proposed that the phases of entrenchment were driven by sea level induced base level fall during MIS 5a/4 and landscape stabilisation during the onset of the current interglacial (MIS 2/1). Second, with the exception of these two entrenchment episodes fan alluviation occurred across the entire last interglacial/glacial cycle in all climatic settings i.e. interglacials, interstadials and stadials. It is likely that the topographic setting of the catchment supplying sediment to Sphakia fan maintained high sediment transfer rates during most climatic settings enabling fan aggradation to occur except during major climatic driven transitions i.e. major sea level fall and postglacial vegetation development.

Radiocarbon dating of marine samples requires a local marine reservoir correction, or ΔR value, for accurate age calibrations. For the Samoan Archipelago in the central Pacific, ΔR values have been proposed previously, but, unlike some Polynesian archipelagoes, ΔR values seem not to vary spatially and temporally. Here, we demonstrate such variability by reporting a ΔR of –101±72 ΔR for the Manu‘a Group—the eastern-most islands in the archipelago—for the colonization period. This value is based on accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) 14C and uranium-thorium (U-Th) series dating of individual coral branches from pre-2300 cal BP archaeological contexts. This figure differs from the previously proposed modern ΔR of 28±26 yr derived from dated historic, pre-1950, shell samples from the western islands of Samoa. Consequently, we recommend using the ΔR of –101±72 yr for the 1st millennium BC in Manu‘a, and 28±26 yr for calibrating dates within the 2nd millennium AD in the western islands (Savai‘i to Tutuila). Until more data from across the archipelago and from throughout the entire culture-historical sequence document ΔR variability, we recommend that researchers use both of these ΔR values to evaluate how the dates of marine-derived samples compare with AMS dates on identified, short-lived wood charcoal.