UNCORRECTED PROOF Postglacial Palaeoceanography in the Skagerrak Richard Gyllencreutz, 1 * Jan Backman, 1 Martin Jakobsson, 1 Catherine Kissel 2 and Eve Arnold 1 ( 1 Department of Geology and Geochemistry, Stockholm University, Sweden; 2 Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, CEA/CNRS/UVSQ, Gif-sur-Yvette, Avenue de la Terrasse, Bat 12, 91198 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France) Received xx xxxx; revised manuscript accepted xx xxxx Abstract: Crucial periods of change in the latest glacial to early-Holocene palaeogeographic and palaeoceanographic evolution in the Skagerrak region are portrayed in four time-slice maps on a calibrated age scale at 14.0 kyr, 11.2 kyr, 10.2 kyr and 8.1 kyr. The course of palaeoenvironmental events is set in a high-resolution chronological framework using IMAGES core MD99-2286 and a grid of chirp sonar profiles. These maps visualize the complex, rapid palaeogeographic and palaeoceanographic changes during the glacial  interglacial transition, which is characterized by major changes in circulation, sediment sources, and depositional processes. Key words: Palaeoceanography, palaeogeography, marine coastal palaeoenvironments, Holocene, Skagerrak, HOLSMEER project. Introduction The Skagerrak is a major sink for fine-grained sediment in the North Sea, receiving material from the entire northwest European drainage system and the North Sea coast. Modern sedimentation rates in Skagerrak’s central and northeastern part are up to 1 cm/yr (van Weering, 1982a; Bøe et al., 1996). These rapidly accumulating sediments contain detailed in- formation about sediment sources and the palaeoceano- graphic evolution of this region. The large-scale palaeoceanographic development of the Skagerrak-Kattegat region during late Pleistocene and Holocene times has been addressed in several seismic surveys (Salge and Wong, 1988; von Haugwitz and Wong, 1993; Rise et al., 1996) and sediment studies (Bjo ¨ rklund et al., 1985; Nordberg, 1991; van Weering et al., 1993; Conradsen and Heier-Nielsen, 1995; Longva and Thorsnes, 1997; Jiang et al., 1997; Gyllencreutz, 2005; Gyllencreutz and Kissel, 2006). Hass (1996) noted that patterns of sedimentation in the Skagerrak are driven by a complex interplay between regional oceanography and cli- mate, resulting in strongly variable deposition over short distances that make core-to-core correlations difficult even over a few kilometres. Several seismo-acoustic surveys in the NE Skagerrak have portrayed postglacial sediment sequences more than 50 m thick (van Weering et al., 1973; van Weering, 1982b; Bøe et al., 1996; Gyllencreutz et al., 2005). A 32.4 m long IMAGES core, MD99-2286 (Labeyrie et al., 2003), was retrieved from such a sequence at 225 m water depth (Figure 1). We present here four maps representing compilations of a literature review, 1 that portray the crucial periods of change in the latest glacial to early-Holocene palaeogeographic and palaeoceanographic evolution of the Skagerrak region. These maps are aimed to visualize the complex and rapid palaeo- geographic and palaeoceanographic changes during a crucial period of transition from c. 14 kyr to c. 8 kyr, characterized by major changes in circulation, sediment sources and depositional processes. The course of palaeoenvironmental events are arranged in a highly resolved chronological framework using the AMS 14 C-dated core MD99-2286 and a set of chirp sonar profiles. The event-stratigraphic maps represent time-slices on a calibrated age scale at 14.0 kyr, 11.2 kyr, 10.2 kyr and 8.1 kyr. This study also represents a synthesis of recent work in the Skagerrak region in the time interval from 14 kyr to 2 kyr (Gyllencreutz, 2005; Gyllen- creutz et al., 2005; Gyllencreutz and Kissel, 2006). The development during the past 2 kyr has been recently synthesized by Hebbeln et al. (2006, this issue). Time- slice maps younger than 8.1 kyr have not been produced because the modern circulation system was essentially established in the Skagerrak at about 8 kyr, when the eastern North Sea coastlines by-and-large had attained their present appearance. *Author for correspondence. Present address: Department of Earth Science, University of Bergen, Alle ´gaten 41, NO-5007, Bergen, Norway. (e-mail: richard.gyllencreutz@geo.uib.no) The Holocene 16,7 (2006) pp. 973  983 # 2006 SAGE Publications 10.1177/0959683606hol988rp Y:/Sage/HOL/Articles/HOL988rp/HOL988RP.3d[x] Tuesday, 5th September 2006 15:20:44