SCP dating
Because SCP profiles have often been found to produce reliable and repeatable historical trends within natural archives, which are easily relatable to fossil-fuel consumption records, these profiles have been used as a means to provide chronological information for cores.
There have generally been two approaches. First, using the major features of the profile (the start of the record, the rapid increase in concentration, the concentration peak) to ascribe dates. For example, in the UK these features would usually be allocated to the mid-19th century, c. 1950 CE and the mid-late 1970s respectively, although there are caveats relating to the first and last of these depending on the completeness of the record and the geographical region of the country. By contrast, the mid-20th century increase appears to be global signal (see here for more info).
The second approach uses the cumulative percentage SCP profile from the start of the record through to the peak to allocate dates to each 10-percentile, thereby providing more dates than the first method although covering the same temporal range. Both approaches initially require a regional calibration whereby independent chronologies (e.g. radiometric dating; varve counting) are used at a number of sites to establish the regional SCP pattern. Once this has been done, SCP profiles at new sites may be used to provide dates with known confidence limits.
Rose, N.L. and Appleby, P.G. (2005). Regional applications of lake sediment dating by spheroidal carbonaceous particle analysis I: United Kingdom. Journal of Paleolimnology. 34: 349 – 361. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10933-005-4925-4