Progress in refining the global radiocarbon calibration curve using New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) tree-ring series from Oxygen Isotope Stage 3

Ancient kauri (Agathis australis) buried in bogs across Northland, New Zealand, provide potential for a continuous high-precision radiocarbon calibration curve that extends to the full chronologic range of the dating method. Here we report four new tree-ring series which in addition to previous work represent some 5312 years across Oxygen Isotope Stage 3, a period during which human evolution, migration and extinction took place against a backdrop of extreme and abrupt global climate and environmental change. We compare our radiocarbon-dated series against three different calibration datasets and find considerable differences in the wiggle-matched solutions, demonstrating the difficulty in undertaking high-precision correlation between ice, marine and terrestrial sequences. One way around the apparent impasse is the use of ¹⁰Be in the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores to precisely link to kauri ¹⁴C from which a decadally/bidecadally-resolved floating 'calibration' dataset can be generated.