Radiocarbon dates for snow petrel stomach-oil deposits (Antarctic mumiyo) from East Antarctica

Stomach-oil deposits from snow petrels (Pagodroma nivea), sometimes referred to as 'Antarctic mumiyo', are found at nest sites in Antarctica. The top and bottom radiocarbon dates of these deposits are used to bracket the interval of snow petrel occupation at the nest sites and determine snow petrel distributions over the last ~50,000 years. Here we present the results from 122 new deposits recovered and analysed by this study from snow petrel nest sites in East Antarctica, spanning Coats Land (n=68), Dronning Maud Land (n=43) , and the Sor Rondane Mountains (n=10) (between 30 degrees West and 23 degrees East). Our new data is supplemented by revised radiocarbon age calibrations of existing published work (182 deposits), given the release of the new radiocarbon calibration curve MARINE20 (Heaton et al., 2020) and new considerations of the treatment of polar radiocarbon age calibrations over glacial-interglacial cycles (Heaton et al., 2023) since the original publications were made.

Funding was provided by H2020 European Research Council Consolidator Grant 'Antarctic Sea Ice Evolution from a novel biological archive' (ANTSIE, grant no. 864637), The Leverhulme Trust (Philip Leverhulme Research Leadership Award, grant no. RL-2019-023), and NERC Standard Grant NE/K003674/1.