Last Interglacial sea-level data points from Northwest Europe

This dataset contains known preserved Last Interglacial (Eemian, Ipswichian, MIS 5e, MIS 5) sea level proxies for NW Europe: from along the shores of the English Channel and North Sea, and from their offshore areas. This V2 version includes 146 sea-level indicator data points from in and around the North Sea (35 entries in Netherlands, 10 Belgium, 23 in Germany, 17 in Denmark, 9 in Britain) and the English Channel (24 entries for the British and 25 for the French side, 3 on the Channel Isles), believed to be a representative and fairly complete inventory and assessment coming from some 80 published sites. The database also includes a modest subselection of data points from older interglacials (six sites), for comparative use. The dataset has been constructed in and has been exported from the World Atlas of Last Interglacial Shorelines (WALIS) database (https://warmcoasts.eu/world-atlas.html).

The sea level proxies in majority are obtained from localities with well developed lithostratigraphic (MIS-6 aged ‘Saalian’ glaciogenic landforms and deposits as the substrate), morphostratigraphic (position in terrace flights), Amino-Acid Racemization, and biostratigraphic constraints ('Lusitanian' molluscan, foraminifera, pollen successions, other). The majority of European continental sites have chronostratigraphic age-control (regional encoding scheme included in dataset) notably by correlation to regional Pollen Association Zones with varve-count based durations (reckoned to span at least 11,000 years of temperate interglacial conditions; matching a good part of MIS 5e), and/or Foraminiferal Association Zones (echoing marine environmental and paleogeographic changes), and/or from AAR zones (majority of British sites, selected sites of mainland NW Europe; albeit for many sites older, lesser quality applications of the technique). In all regions, some of the marine deposits and bracketing terrestrial ones have also been independently dated using luminescence (IRSL, OSL, TL), U-series and ESR techniques.