Aeolian Environments

Abstract

The literature on aeolian processes and on aeolian morphological and sedimentological features has shown a dramatic increase during the last decade. A variety of textbooks, extensive reviews, and special issues of journal volumes devoted to aeolian research have been published (Nordstrom et al. 1990; Pye and Tsoar 1990; Kozarski 1991; Pye 1993; Pye and Lancaster 1993; Cooke et al. 1993; Lancaster 1995; Tchakerian 1995; Livingstone and Warren 1996; Goudie et al. 1999). However, not surprisingly the majority of these studies discuss aeolian processes and phenomena in the extensive warm arid regions of the world. The results of aeolian research in the less extensive, but still impressive, cold arid environments of the world are only available in a diversity of articles. At best they are only briefly mentioned in textbooks on aeolian geomorphology (Koster 1988, 1995; McKenna-Neuman 1993). Likewise, the literature with respect to wind-driven deposits in western Europe is scattered and not easily accessible. The aeolian geological record for Europe, as reflected in the ‘European sand belt’ in the north-western and central European Lowlands, which extends from Britain to the Polish–Russian border, is known in great detail (Koster 1988; van Geel et al. 1989; Böse 1991). Zeeberg (1998) showed that extensive aeolian deposits progress with two separate arms into the Baltic Region, and into Belorussia and northernmost Ukraine. Recently, Mangerud et al. (1999) concluded that the sand belt extends even to the Pechora lowlands close to the north-western border of the Ural mountain range in Russia. Sand dunes and cover sands are widespread and well developed in this easternmost extension of the European sand belt. The northerly edges of this sand belt more or less coincide with the maximal position of the Late Weichselian (Devensian, Vistulian) ice sheet, while the southern edges grade into coverloams or sandy loess and loess (Mücher 1986; Siebertz 1988; Antoine et al. 1999). However, along these southern edges the dune fields and sand sheets regionally are derived from different sources, such as the sands of the Keuper Formation or the floodplains of the Rhine and Main rivers.