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The Climatic History of the Eastern Mediterranean as Recorded in Mollusk Shells

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

Aaron Kaufman
Affiliation:
Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
Mordeckai Magaritz
Affiliation:
Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
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Abstract

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An 18O/16O versus 14C age curve was constructed for unrecrystallized Holocene marine shell samples from Israel that were shown to be homogeneous populations. The surprisingly large variation in the oxygen isotopic composition (1.2‰) between 2600 and 4000 years ago is most probably due to variations in the isotopic composition of the water. This implies that either the excess of evaporation over precipitation or the Nile river discharge must have varied significantly during the Holocene.

Type
Quaternary
Copyright
Copyright © The American Journal of Science

References

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