A varved lake sediment record of the ¹⁰Be solar activity proxy for the Lateglacial-Holocene transition

Solar modulated variations in cosmogenic radionuclide production provide both information on past changes in the activity of the Sun and a global synchronization tool. However, to date the use of cosmogenic radionuclides for these applications is almost exclusively based on ¹⁰Be records from ice cores and ¹⁴C time-series from tree rings, all including archive-specific limitations. We present the first ¹⁰Be record from annually laminated (varved) lake sediments for the Lateglacial-Holocene transition from Meerfelder Maar. We quantify environmental influences on the catchment and, consequently, ¹⁰Be deposition using a new approach based on regression analyses between our ¹⁰Be record and environmental proxy time-series from the same archive. Our analyses suggest that environmental influences contribute to up to 37% of the variability in our ¹⁰Be record, but cannot be the main explanation for major ¹⁰Be excursions. Corrected for these environmental influences, our ¹⁰Be record is interpreted to dominantly reflect changes in solar modulated cosmogenic radionuclide production. The preservation of a solar production signal in ¹⁰Be from varved lake sediments highlights the largely unexplored potential of these archives for solar activity reconstruction, as global synchronization tool and, thus, for more robust paleoclimate studies.