New discoveries of the Vedde Ash in southern Sweden and Scotland

The Vedde Ash (c. 10 300 ¹⁴C BP) provides a key time-parallel marker horizon within the Younger Dryas chronozone or GS-1 event of the GRIP stratigraphy. Until recently, the known distribution of wind-blown Vedde Ash outside Iceland was restricted to the west coast of Norway, off-shore sequences close to the Outer Hebrides and the Greenland summit GRIP ice core. The first discoveries of the Vedde Ash in Scotland were reported in 1997, following the development of a new technique for extracting rhyolitic micro-tephra particles from minerogenic deposits. Here we report on the discovery of the Vedde Ash at additional sites in Scotland and at sites in southern Sweden. The concentration of tephra particles in sediments is highest in sites in western Norway, but is also relatively high in sites in southwestern Sweden, suggesting that the main ash cloud travelled eastwards from its volcanic source of Katla, in southern Iceland. Electron microprobe analyses do not indicate any clear geochemical evolution within the samples reported here.