The World Atlas of Last Interglacial Shorelines (version 1.0)

Abstract

This paper presents version 1.0 of the World Atlas of Last Interglacial Shorelines (WALIS), a global database of sea-level proxies and samples dated to marine isotope stage 5 (∼ 80 to 130 ka). The database includes a series of datasets compiled in the framework of a special issue published in this journal (https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/special_issue1055.html, last access: 15 December 2022). This paper collates the individual contributions (archived in a Zenodo community at https://zenodo.org/communities/walis_database/, last access: 15 December 2022) into an open-access, standalone database (Rovere et al., 2022, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7348242). The release of WALIS 1.0 includes complete documentation and scripts to download, analyze, and visualize the data (https://alerovere.github.io/WALIS/, last access: 15 December 2022). The database contains 4545 sea-level proxies (e.g., marine terraces or fossil beach deposits), 4110 dated samples (e.g., corals dated with U-series), and 280 other time constraints (e.g., biostratigraphic constraints or tephra layers) interconnected with several tables containing accessory data and metadata. By creating a centralized database of sea-level proxy data for the Last Interglacial, the WALIS database will be a valuable resource to the broader paleoclimate community to facilitate data–model integration and intercomparisons, assessments of sea-level reconstructions between different studies and different regions, as well as comparisons between past sea-level history and other paleoclimate proxy data.