10Be in Chinese loess

We report a first series of10Be measurements on Chinese loess covering the last 750,000 years. The10Be concentration shows a tendency to decrease with increasing grain size. Leaching experiments with acid solutions show that10Be is strongly bound to particles and therefore mobility due to dissolution can be excluded. The10Be record in loess shows features similar to those observed inδ180 records from deep-sea sediments which strongly reflect climatic variations. This allows one to correlate the10Be loess records withδ180 deep-sea records and to establish a time scale. Based on this time scale, accumulation rates of loess and10Be fluxes can be calculated. These reveal generally higher values for cold, arid and windy periods than for warm, humid and calmer intervals.