Distribution of the C37 tetra-unsaturated alkenone in Lake Qinghai, China: A potential lake salinity indicator

The alkenone unsaturation index UK′37 has been applied to reconstruct past temperature changes in both marine and lacustrine systems. However, few studies have addressed whether the relative abundance of the C37:4 alkenone to the total C37 production (%C37:4) can reflect surface salinity changes in lacustrine systems. Here we present long-chain C37 alkenone distribution patterns in surface sediments from Lake Qinghai, China. Surface sediments were sampled over a large range of surface salinity changes (1.7–25 g/l) within Lake Qinghai and its surrounding lakes, while temperature differences at these sampling locations should be relatively small. We have found that %C37:4 varies from 15% to 49% as surface salinity decreases. We tentatively describe this %C37:4–salinity link with a general linear regression: %C37:4 = 53.4 (±7.8) − 1.73 (±0.45) × S (n = 28, r2 = 0.62), although step-wise %C37:4 changes in response to salinity variation may exist. UK′37 values vary between 0.10 and 0.16 at these sites and the inferred range of lake water temperature changes is ∼2–3 °C, suggesting that UK′37 largely reflects temperature signal across a large salinity range, consistent with previous findings that UK′37 can indicate temperature changes over a large diversity of environmental settings. We have also found that UK′37 values are correlated with salinity changes (r2 = 0.4), and thus cannot exclude potential temperature effect on %C37:4 and salinity effect on UK′37 in this study. However, even extreme estimates of temperature differences within the lake are still unable to explain the observed %C37:4 changes. We therefore suggest that %C37:4 could be used to infer past lake salinity changes at a regional scale.