Clim. Past, 15, 1793–1808, 2019 https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-15-1793-2019 © Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. The SP19 chronology for the South Pole Ice Core – Part 1: volcanic matching and annual layer counting Dominic A. Winski 1,2 , Tyler J. Fudge 3 , David G. Ferris 4 , Erich C. Osterberg 4 , John M. Fegyveresi 5 , Jihong Cole-Dai 6 , Zayta Thundercloud 4 , Thomas S. Cox 7 , Karl J. Kreutz 1,2 , Nikolas Ortman 4 , Christo Buizert 8 , Jenna Epifanio 8 , Edward J. Brook 8 , Ross Beaudette 9 , Jeffrey Severinghaus 9 , Todd Sowers 10 , Eric J. Steig 3 , Emma C. Kahle 3 , Tyler R. Jones 11 , Valerie Morris 11 , Murat Aydin 12 , Melinda R. Nicewonger 12 , Kimberly A. Casey 13,14 , Richard B. Alley 10 , Edwin D. Waddington 3 , Nels A. Iverson 15 , Nelia W. Dunbar 15 , Ryan C. Bay 16 , Joseph M. Souney 17 , Michael Sigl 18 , and Joseph R. McConnell 19 1 School of Earth and Climate Sciences, University of Maine, Orono, Maine, USA 2 Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, Orono, Maine, USA 3 Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA 4 Department of Earth Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA 5 School of Earth and Sustainability, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, USA 6 Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, South Dakota State University, Brookings, South Dakota, USA 7 Physical Science Department, Butte College, Oroville, California, USA 8 College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA 9 Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA 10 Department of Geosciences and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA 11 Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA 12 Department of Earth System Science, UC Irvine, Irvine, California, USA 13 Earth Sciences Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA 14 National Land Imaging Program, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia, USA 15 New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, Socorro, New Mexico, USA 16 Physics Department, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA 17 Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire, USA 18 Department of Climate and Environmental Physics, University of Bern, Switzerland 19 Division of Hydrologic Sciences, Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nevada, USA Correspondence: Dominic A. Winski (dominic.winski@maine.edu) Received: 23 May 2019 – Discussion started: 5 June 2019 Revised: 20 August 2019 – Accepted: 23 August 2019 – Published: 8 October 2019 Abstract. The South Pole Ice Core (SPICEcore) was drilled in 2014–2016 to provide a detailed multi-proxy archive of paleoclimate conditions in East Antarctica during the Holocene and late Pleistocene. Interpretation of these records requires an accurate depth–age relationship. Here, we present the SPICEcore (SP19) timescale for the age of the ice of SPICEcore. SP19 is synchronized to the WD2014 chronol- ogy from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) ice core using stratigraphic matching of 251 volcanic events. These events indicate an age of 54 302±519 BP (years before 1950) at the bottom of SPICEcore. Annual layers identified in sodium and magnesium ions to 11 341 BP were used to in- terpolate between stratigraphic volcanic tie points, yielding an annually resolved chronology through the Holocene. Esti- mated timescale uncertainty during the Holocene is less than 18 years relative to WD2014, with the exception of the in- Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union.