RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN UNDERSTANDING THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE CASPIAN SEA-LEVEL CHANGE (Invited Presentation)

The Caspian Sea is a unique basin due to its history of frequent sea-level fluctuations of high magnitude. Despite the long history of studying the Caspian Quaternary evolution, the number of transgressive-regressive cycles, their size and the scale of the sea-level change remain a controversial issue. One of the important questions, which have not yet found a consensus in Quaternary community, is the correlation of major events in the history of the Caspian Sea with paleogeographic events in the center of the Eurasian continent and with global climate change. The most important reason why no generally accepted correlation of the Caspian transgressions with global charts was developed is the lack of a reliable absolute chronology of the Pleistocene sea level fluctuations. In recent years, we have obtained more than 500 new ages using luminescence dating of the marine Caspian sediments and separating them continental loess-paleosol series from the Turkmen, Kazakh, Dagestan, Iranian coasts, the Manych Depression, the Lower and Middle Volga valleys. Field studies, analysis of a series of sections, and luminescence dating were supported by the Russian Science Foundation (19-77-10077). We will present new data on the absolute age, combined with materials from the study of the marine mollusks fauna, analysis of the lithology of sediments, and a detailed study of loess-paleosol series, which allowed developing a new chronological chart of the Caspian transgressions over the last 350 thousand years.