TIME SCALE OF LOESS IN THE SANMENXIA AREA

The 153 m thick Caocun loess profile at Zhangbian Township located at the southeast margin of the Loess Plateau is typical of the Sanmenxia area.In the profile there occurs a complete,145 m thick loess-paleosol sequence consisting of continuous dust deposits from L₁ to L₃₃ 145 m thick.The establishment of an accurate time scale of the Caocun loess sequence is important not only for the study of (millenial-scale) paleomonsoonal change on the Loess plateau but also for the correlation of global paleoclimate changes between land and sea.In this paper four available time scale models are introduced and the time scale of loess in Sanmenxia is studied using the susceptibility model and grain-size model and checked.It is feasible to establish the time scale of the Caocun loess using several models.