PROGRESS OF QUATERNARY CHRONOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN THE YELLOW SEA

Sediments from the continental shelf are suitable for studies on sea-level and environmental-climatic changes. The Yellow Sea is a typically continental shelf sea and has always been a hot spot in geoscientific studies. Age determination of the sediments is the most fundamental problem to be solved in paleoenvironmental research. In this paper, we summarized the research products and problems of Quaternary chronology in the past ~30 years in the Yellow Sea. Generally, the chronological study in the South Yellow Sea is evidently higher than that in the North Yellow Sea and the chronological studies of short-time scales also precede the studies of long-time scales. Data of the short-time scales indicate that ages in equal depths vary at different sites, which could be resulted from not only the complicated sediementary environment but also the dating methods and materials. Studies of long-time scale research are presently focused on the magnetostratigraphy of three cores in the South Yellow Sea, and the data reveal that the B/M boundary in this area can be constrained at 60-70 m interval. Since the studies of long-time scales in the Yellow Sea are quite scarce, it should be taken as the research focus in the future chronological studies.