Climate change dynamics in Northern Eurasia over the last 200 ka: Evidence from mollusc-based ESR-chronostratigraphy and vegetation successions of the loess–palaeosol records

Abstract

The time span of the past 200 ka has been marked by many large-scale global and regional climate changes, between warmer and cooler conditions. As is usually the case when studying the past, palaeoenvironmental data become scarcer with increasing age. Therefore, every detailed palaeoenvironmental record may be of special interest to Quaternary geologists in terms of palaeoenvironmental reconstructions, correlations and general stratigraphy of the Quaternary. In this paper we present a long palynological record of terrestrial flora and an ESR-dated marine record of global-scale climatic variation obtained from a loess–palaeosol sequence in the East European Plain and continental margin of Northern Eurasia for the time span starting from the penultimate glacial period correlating with Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 6. These records show that in combination they have a potential of assigning warm/cold climate related deposits to the chronostratigraphically organised sequence of the late Pleistocene palaeoenvironmental events.