The Classic Marine Isotope Substage 5e

Since its identification nearly fifty years ago, Marine Iso-tope Stage 5 (MIS 5) has been placed onto absolute time scaleson the basis of three independent approaches. Cesare Emiliani,who set up the isotope stages (Emiliani, 1955), depended onuranium-series dating of the sediments, a method that today isregarded as not generally capable of yielding useful precisionor accuracy. Broecker and van Donk (1970) pioneered the ap-proach of correlating to radiometrically dated marine coral ter-races;thishasbeenmuchaidedinrecentyearsbyimprovementsin the precision and accuracy of these age determinations thathave flowed from the development of thermal ionization massspectrometry (TIMS) for uranium-series dating (Edwards