Reconstruction of 130-kyr Relative Geomagnetic Intensities from 10Be in Two Chinese Loess Sections

Efforts to extract weak geomagnetic excursion signals from Chinese loess-paleosol 10Be have generally been unsuccessful due to the complexities of its accumulation, because the geomagnetic and climate (precipitation and dust) signals contained in loess-paleosol sequence are tightly overprinted. Here, we present a reconstruction of geomagnetic relative paleointensities for the past 130 kyr from 10Be records in 2 Chinese loess-paleosol sections using a correction based on the correlation of 10Be with magnetic susceptibility (SUS) to remove the climatic contamination. Both these records reveal the Laschamp and Blake events, which lie in the loess and paleosol (L1SS1 and S1SS3) horizons corresponding to mid-MIS 3 and 5e, respectively. The good agreement between our results and other geomagnetic intensities reconstructions from Atlantic and Pacific sediments indicates that our method is robust. Our study suggests the potential application of loess-paleosol 10Be for reconstructing geomagnetic intensity variations spanning the whole Quaternary.