A paper entitled ‘a combined luminescence and radiocarbon dating study of Holocene lacustrine sediments from arid northern China’ by Long et al. was published as the first research paper of Quaternary Geochronology in 2011.

This paper is about the chronology of lake sediments by OSL and radiocarbon dating. To test the applicability of OSL dating methods to Holocene lake sediments and to evaluate the hard water reservoir effect of 14C dating in arid northern China, 12 OSL samples and 12 radiocarbon samples were dated. The apparent agreement between OSL and 14C dating for QTL section from Tengger Desert suggests that the hard water reservoir effect of 14C samples in the study area is much smaller than that in other lakes in northern China, which is also supported by analyses on two 14C samples using different dating materials for each of the two individual samples. And this paper suggested that OSL dating could have considerable potential for improving the chronology of Holocene lake sediments in the arid northern China, especially in those cases where there is a significant ‘old carbon’ problem when using 14C dating.

Quaternary Geochronology is an international journal devoted to the publication of the highest-quality, peer-reviewed articles on all aspects of dating methods applicable to the Quaternary period of Earth history. The impact factor of this journal is 2.853.