Last interglacial sea-level proxies in East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a sea-level database compiled using published last interglacial, Marine Isotopic Stage 5 (MIS 5), geological sea-level proxies within East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean (EAWIO). Encompassing vast tropical coastlines and coralline islands, this region has many occurrences of well-preserved last interglacial stratigraphies. Most notably, islands almost entirely composed of Pleistocene reefs (such as Aldabra, the Seychelles) have provided reliable paleo relative sea-level indicators and well-preserved samples for U-series chronology. Other sea-level proxies include uplifted marine terraces in the north of Somalia and Pleistocene eolian deposits notched by the MIS 5 sea level in Mozambique to tidal notches in luminescence-limited eolian deposits in Mozambique. Our database has been compiled using the World Atlas of Last Interglacial Shorelines (WALIS) interface and contains 58 sea-level indicators and 2 terrestrial-limiting data points. The open-access database is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4302244 (Version 1.03; Boyden et al., 2020).