A new Scandinavian reference 10Be production rate

•We use Baltic Ice Lake drainage erosion surfaces to calibrate a 10Be production rate.•Combination with data from 3 sites in Norway yields a Scandinavian production rate.•The Scandinavian production rate conforms with established production rates.

An important constraint on the reliability of cosmogenic nuclide exposure dating is the rigorous determination of production rates. We present a new dataset for 10Be production rate calibration from Mount Billingen, southern Sweden, the site of the final drainage of the Baltic Ice Lake, an event dated to 11,620 ± 100 cal yr BP. Five samples of flood-scoured bedrock surfaces (58.5°N, 13.7°E, 105–120 m a.s.l.) unambiguously connected to the drainage event yield a reference 10Be production rate of 4.19 ± 0.20 atoms g−1 yr−1 for the CRONUS-Earth online calculator Lm scaling and 4.02 ± 0.18 atoms g−1 yr−1 for the nuclide specific LSDn scaling. We also recalibrate the reference 10Be production rates for four sites in Norway and combine three of these with the Billingen results to derive a tightly clustered Scandinavian reference 10Be production rate of 4.13 ± 0.11 atoms g−1 yr−1 for the CRONUS Lm scaling and 3.95 ± 0.10 atoms g−1 yr−1 for the LSDn scaling scheme.

Graphical abstractFigure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slide