Presented are analytical data from lacustrine sediment cores, retrieved from Lake Nam Co (Tibetan Plateau). The sediment core is a composite of one gravity core, taken with a Rumohr-Meischner gravity corer (63 mm diameter) and a piston core, retrieved using an uwitec piston coring system (http://www.uwitec.at; 90 mm diameter). The composite core labelled comprises a total length of 10.378 m. The cores were obtained at N 30.737417, E 090.790333 at a water depth of 93 m on 2008-09-15. The purpose of obtaining this sediment core was to establish a high-resolution record of climate (monsoonal) and environmental change using multiple proxy data. The dataset comprises analytical data based on sedimentological, inorganic geochemical, mineralogical and isotope-geochemical methods. Specifically: sediment water content & density; magnetic susceptibility; particel size data; quantitative inorganic geochemical data (ICP-OES aqua regia and HCL digestions); semi-quantitative XRF elemental data; carbon, nitrogen, sulfur contents; qualitative mineralogical data; bulk sediment stable carbon and oxygen isotope data.

To obtain quantitative elemental data ca. 200 mg of dry and ground sediment per sample (237 samples in total) was digested using a microwave-assisted, modified aqua regia digestion. To separate carbonate-bound and noncarbonated fractions of different elements an HCl digestion was performed on a subset (113) of the samples. Measurement was carried out with an ICP-OES device (Varian Liberty 150, Agilent Technologies). To ensure data reliability, a certified reference material (River sediment 'LGC6 187') was analyzed with each batch (9 samples = 1 batch). Error estimates are based on 10 triplicate measurements of individual samples.Element units were given originally in ppm.