REGIONAL CHRONOSTRATIGRAPHICAL CORRELATION CHART FOR THE LAST 270,000 YEARS: EUROPE NORTH OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

This presentation will offer a regional stratigraphical scheme for Europe north of the Mediterranean Sea. The chart will show the events during the critical last 10% of Quaternary time. The implications of these events bear strongly on today’s environment. Deposits from this critical period are studied in the highest resolution. They are widespread, still being preserved, indeed they are better preserved than those from older cycles. This is because in Europe the last glacial ice sheets were less extensive than those of the penultimate cycle. Other key events during this period include the ‘last climatic warming’ / ‘last sea-level rise’ which makes the application of stratigraphical correlation techniques to this ‘youngest fragment of geological time’ a particularly testing exercise.

Many Quaternarists view Europe’s glacial-interglacial cycles from the perspective of the 100 ka climate cycles, and tend to bias their interpretation by considering the ‘Saalian glacial maximum’ (= Riss maximum)’ and the ‘Weichselian glacial maximum’ (= Würmian, Devensian). We tend to forget that the 40 ka cyclicity was superimposed on that of the 100 ka cycles with equal forcing power. There is also a tendancy to forget that parts of Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 4 included comparable European ice volumes and cold climates as severe as those during MIS 6 and MIS 2.

The chart displays the chrono-/climatostratigraphically subdivided geological record of landscape and climate change in linear time. This is done to demonstrate that the record of the last 270 ka is considerably more than ‘two glacial maxima plus the Holocene’, but it contains an additional 200 ka of ‘normal’ conditions, throughout which landscape and sedimentary archive forming processes continued to operate. It is supported by schematic plots of glacial extent in several regions, selected deep-sea records, sea-level changes, loess deposition and extra-glacial events.