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 luminescencelimited 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).