A Late Pleistocene sea level stack

Abstract. Late Pleistocene sea level has been reconstructed from ocean sediment core data using a wide variety of proxies and models. However, the accuracy of individual reconstructions is limited by measurement error, local variations in salinity and temperature, and assumptions particular to each technique. Here we present a sea level stack (average) which increases the signal-to-noise ratio of individual reconstructions. Specifically, we perform principal component analysis (PCA) on seven records from 0 to 430 ka and five records from 0 to 798 ka. The first principal component, which we use as the stack, describes ∼ 80 % of the variance in the data and is similar using either five or seven records. After…