Lakes, Lacustrine Sediments, and Palaeoenvironmental Reconstructions

Abstract

Acting as sensitive and accurate barometers, lake and peat sediment records enable us to acquire an increasingly broader perspective on the mechanisms behind climatic and environmental changes. Over the past two decades, the rising number and amount of data yielded by palaeolimnological studies for the Central–Eastern Europe, in general, and Romania, in particular, allowed for the construction of a wide network of well-dated records which enabled comparison with the hallmark palaeoclimatic event stratigraphy of the North–Atlantic area and Western Europe. More specifically, the combined use of biological indicators with physical and geochemical data resulted in a multi-proxy approach for a variety of sites extending from the Transylvanian lowlands to the uplands of the Romanian Carpathians and spanning throughout the Holocene to the Pleniglacial. This section introduces a brief synthesis of the most outstanding results delivered by various investigations on Romanian lake and peat archives. Among these, lakes and peat bogs which came into existence during deglaciation, including both glacial lakes located in higher elevation mountain areas and lakes formed at lower elevations due to landslides subsequent to permafrost thaw are prevalent, and were preferred for such studies due to their long lifespan and location in mountain areas which have exhibited increased sensitivity to centennial and millennial-scale climate changes. The potential of lacustrine sediments for inferring past dynamics of climate and environmental conditions prompts us to highlight the necessity for expanding the spatiotemporal coverage of such studies in Romania in an attempt to create a relatively unitary perspective on regional palaeoenvironmental evolution.