• DOI:10.1017/RDC.2020.41
• Corpus ID: 216215614

The IntCal20 Northern Hemisphere Radiocarbon Age Calibration Curve (0–55 cal kBP)

@article{Reimer2020TheIN,
  title={The IntCal20 Northern Hemisphere Radiocarbon Age Calibration Curve (0–55 cal kBP)},
  author={Paula J. Reimer and William E. N. Austin and Edouard Bard and Alex Bayliss and Paul G. Blackwell and Christopher Bronk Ramsey and Martin Butzin and Hai Cheng and Richard Lawrence Edwards and Michael Friedrich and Pieter M. Grootes and Thomas P. Guilderson and I. Hajdas and Timothy J. Heaton and Alan G. Hogg and Konrad A. Hughen and Bernd Kromer and Sturt W. Manning and Raimund Muscheler and Jonathan Gray Palmer and Charlotte L Pearson and Johannes van der Plicht and Ron W. Reimer and David A. Richards and E. Marian Scott and John R. Southon and Chris S. M. Turney and Lukas Wacker and Florian Adolphi and Ulf B{\"u}ntgen and Manuela Capano and Simon M Fahrni and Alexandra Fogtmann-Schulz and Ronny Friedrich and Peter K{\"o}hler and Sabrina G K Kudsk and Fusa Miyake and Jesper Olsen and Frederick Reinig and Minoru Sakamoto and Adam Sookdeo and Sahra Talamo},
  journal={Radiocarbon},
  year={2020},
  volume={62},
  pages={725 - 757}
}

• P. Reimer, W. Austin, +39 authors S. Talamo
• Published 1 August 2020
• Environmental Science, Geography
• Radiocarbon

ABSTRACT Radiocarbon (14C) ages cannot provide absolutely dated chronologies for archaeological or paleoenvironmental studies directly but must be converted to calendar age equivalents using a calibration curve compensating for fluctuations in atmospheric 14C concentration. Although calibration curves are constructed from independently dated archives, they invariably require revision as new data become available and our understanding of the Earth system improves. In this volume the international 14C calibration curves for both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, as well as for the ocean surface layer, have been updated to include a wealth of new data and extended to 55,000 cal BP. Based on tree rings, IntCal20 now extends as a fully atmospheric record to ca. 13,900 cal BP. For the older part of the timescale, IntCal20 comprises statistically integrated evidence from floating tree-ring chronologies, lacustrine and marine sediments, speleothems, and corals. We utilized improved evaluation of the timescales and location variable 14C offsets from the atmosphere (reservoir age, dead carbon fraction) for each dataset. New statistical methods have refined the structure of the calibration curves while maintaining a robust treatment of uncertainties in the 14C ages, the calendar ages and other corrections. The inclusion of modeled marine reservoir ages derived from a three-dimensional ocean circulation model has allowed us to apply more appropriate reservoir corrections to the marine 14C data rather than the previous use of constant regional offsets from the atmosphere. Here we provide an overview of the new and revised datasets and the associated methods used for the construction of the IntCal20 curve and explore potential regional offsets for tree-ring data. We discuss the main differences with respect to the previous calibration curve, IntCal13, and some of the implications for archaeology and geosciences ranging from the recent past to the time of the extinction of the Neanderthals.