Chemical de-staining and the delta correction for blue intensity measurements of stained lake subfossil trees

Abstract

Abstract. The stain of wood samples from lake subfossil trees (LSTs) is challenging the wide application of the blue intensity (BI) technique for millennial dendroclimatic reconstructions. In this study, we used seven chemical de-staining reagents to treat samples of subfossil black spruce (Picea mariana (Mill.) B.S.P.)) trees from two lakes in the eastern Canadian boreal forest. We subsequently compared latewood BI (LBI) and delta BI (DBI) time series along with conventional maximum latewood density (MXD) measured from the stained and de-stained samples. Results show that the stain of our samples is most likely caused by post-sampling oxidation of dissolved ferrous iron in lake sediments that penetrated into wood. Three reagents (ascorbic acid, sodium ascorbate and sodium dithionite all mixed with ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid) could remove > 90 % of Fe. However, even for the best chemical protocol, a discrepancy of about +2 °C compared to MXD data remains in the LBI-based temperature reconstruction due to incomplete de-staining. On the contrary, the simple mathematical delta correction, DBI is unaffected by Fe stain and shows very similar results compared to MXD data (r > 0.82) from annual to centennial timescales over the past ~ 360 years. This study underlines the difficulty of completely de-staining lake subfossil samples, while confirming the robustness of the DBI approach. DBI data measured from stained LSTs can be used to perform robust millennial temperature reconstructions.

Chemical destaining and the delta correction for blue intensity measurements of stained lake subfossil trees

“…Instrumental temperature data are available from Climate Explorer at https://climexp.knmi.nl/start.cgi (KNMI Climate Explorer, 2020). Other data used for analysis are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3930493 (Wang et al, 2020b).…”