Optically stimulated luminescence dating of sand-dune formed within the Little Ice Age

•Difficult to date dim and young quartz.•Using annealing to increase OSL sensitivity for SAR protocol.•Last Dali sand dune activities happened during the Little Ice Age.

Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating has been intensively used to date the late Quaternary deposits. The Single-Aliquot Regenerative-dose (SAR) protocol was applied to measure coarse quartz grains extracted from Dali sand dunes, central China. It was found that this popular method could not accurately date sand dunes activities that recently happened. This is due to the low OSL sensitivity of quartz grains, leading to a failure in OSL dating that has also been met in other sediments before. To overcome this limitation, quartz grains were heated to 500 °C to increase the OSL output for one magnitude. Sensitivity changes could also be corrected by the following test dose OSL responses and has no influence on OSL ages. Thus it is suggested to carry out the SAR protocol for dim and young quartz OSL samples with additional annealing step (e.g. 500 °C) after the measurements of natural cycle. The resultant OSL ages proved that the last sand-dune activities happened during the Little Ice Age (∼400 years ago), which was further supported by independent age control (∼1600 AD) from historical documents.