Towards multi-proxy based millennial time scales in Late Pleistocene Danubian Loess-Palaeosol Sequences

Abstract

Late Pleistocene palaeoclimatic records for south-eastern Europe rely largely on loess-palaeosol sequences (LPSS). The general spatial scarcity and often limited temporal range of other sedimentary archives assign the LPSS of the region a key role even in millennial scale temporal reconstructions of the Late Pleistocene terrestrial environmental dynamics. In Eurasia, aeolian dust sediments (loess) are widespread in continental mid-latitudes. The Eurasian loess-belt has its western end in the Middle Danube (Carpathian) and the Lower Danube Basin. Similar to the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP) and to the steppe areas of Central Asia one can find true loess plateaus in this area dating back more than one million years and comprising a semi-continuous record of the Quaternary palaeoclimate (Markovic et al. 2011, 2015).