page_title: Marine isotope stage
section_title: Stages
hierarchical_section_title: Marine isotope stage / Stages
caption_attribution_description: English: Sediment core, taken with a gravity corer by the research vessel POLARSTERN in the South Atlantic; light/dark-coloured changes are due to climate cycles of the Quaternary; basis age of the core is about 1 Million years (length of each segment is 1&#160;m). For a more detailed description and detail photographs of the core see Gersonde (2003).[1] Deutsch: Sedimentkern, entnommen mit einem Schwerelot vom Forschungsschiff POLARSTERN im Südatlantik; die wechselnde hell/dunkel-Färbung ist ein Abbild der Klimazylen im Quartär; das Basisalter des Kerns beträgt ca. 1 Million Jahre (die Länge der einzelnen Segmente beträgt 1&#160;m). Für eine detailliertere Beschreibung und Detailaufnahmen des Kerns siehe Gersonde (2003).[1] ↑ a b Rainer Gersonde (2003): Documentation of sediment core PS2492-2. Alfred Wegener Institute - Polarstern core repository, doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.115344
context_page_description: Marine isotope stages, marine oxygen-isotope stages, or oxygen isotope stages, are alternating warm and cool periods in the Earth's paleoclimate, deduced from oxygen isotope data reflecting changes in temperature derived from data from deep sea core samples. Working backwards from the present, which is MIS 1 in the scale, stages with even numbers have high levels of oxygen-18 and represent cold glacial periods, while the odd-numbered stages are troughs in the oxygen-18 figures, representing warm interglacial intervals. The data are derived from pollen and foraminifera remains in drilled marine sediment cores, sapropels, and other data that reflect historic climate; these are called proxies.
  The MIS timescale was developed from the pioneering work of Cesare Emiliani in the 1950s, and is now widely used in archaeology and other fields to express dating in the Quaternary period, as well as providing the fullest and best data for that period for paleoclimatology or the study of the early climate of the Earth, representing "the standard to which we correlate other Quaternary climate records".
context_section_description: The following are the start dates (apart from MIS 5 sub-stages) of the most recent MIS (Lisiecki & Raymo 2005, LR04 Benthic Stack). The figures, in thousands of years ago, are from Lisiecki's website. Numbers for substages in MIS 5 denote peaks of substages rather than boundaries.
  MIS     Start date
  MIS 1 – 14 kya, end of the Younger Dryas marks the start of the Holocene. The LR04 date of 14 kya had to accommodate less well studied time intervals, and the generally accepted date of 11.7 kya is to be preferred.
  MIS 2 – 29
  MIS 3 – 57 (MIS 2-4 is called the Last Glacial Period, Wisconsinan glaciation in North America, Weichselian glaciation in Europe)
  MIS 4 – 71
  MIS 5 – 130, usually sub-divided into a to e:
  MIS 5a – 82 (peak of interglacial sub-stage)
  MIS 5b – 87 (peak of glacial sub-stage)
  MIS 5c – 96 (peak of interglacial sub-stage)
  MIS 5d – 109 (peak of glacial sub-stage)
  MIS 5e – 123 (peak of Eemian interglacial sub-stage, or Ipswichian in Britain)
  MIS 6 – 191 (Illinoian glacial in North America, Saalian in northern Europe and Wolstonian in Britain)
  MIS 7 – 243 (Aveley Interglacial in Britain)
  MIS 8 – 300
  MIS 9 – 337 (Purfleet Interglacial in Britain)
  MIS 10 – 374
  MIS 11 – 424 (Hoxnian Interglacial in Britain)
  MIS 12 – 478 (Anglian Glacial in Britain, Elster glaciation in North America)
  MIS 13 – 524
  MIS 14 – 563
  MIS 15 – 621
  MIS 16 – 676
  MIS 17 – 712
  MIS 18 – 761
  MIS 19 – 790 (Brunhes–Matuyama reversal)
  MIS 20 – 814
  MIS 21 – 866
  The list continues to MIS 104, beginning 2.614 million years ago.
caption: Marine core sections from the South Atlantic, about a million years old
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