Fabien Arnaud, Pierre Sabatier, Anouk Leloup, Aymerick Servettaz, Bertrand Moine, Anne-Lise Develle, Stéphane Guédron, Vincent Perrot, Cécile Pignol, Jérôme Poulenard

Up to now, no geochemical or geochronological data has been published about Holocene volcanic activity on the Kerguelen Archipelago. Here we present the first continuous Holocene chronology of volcanic eruptions on the archipelago. We compared sedimentological, geochronological and geochemical data from two lake sediment cores taken in two different depocenters of Lake Armor, located ca. 70 km away from the archipelago’s main volcanic area. This allowed us to confidently assign the pumice- and ash-rich layers that are interbedded in the lake sediments to distinct volcanic eruptions. Eight main and 3 minor eruptions were thus documented and dated, among which the youngest occurred during the Middle Ages, in AD 1020 +/- 58. The oldest eruption (11,175 +/- 275 cal. BP) is also by far the strongest and deposited, more than 1.2 m of up to 3 cm-large pumices in Lake Armor area. The new tephrostratigraphy presented here may serve as a tool to synchronise paleoenvironmental records from Kerguelen as well as marine records from he Kerguelen rise and beyond. areas.