Towards multi-proxy based millennial time scales in Lower Danubian Late Pleistocene Loess-Palaeosol Sequences: evidence for persistent North Atlantic sea surface temperature control

Ulrich Hambach1, Christian Zeeden2, Igor Obreht2, Frank Lehmkuhl2, Daniel Veres3, Slobodan B. Marković4
1 BayCEER & Chair of Geomorphology, University of Bayreuth, Germany
2 Department of Geography, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
3 Institute of Speleology, Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
4 Laboratory for Palaeoenvironmental Reconstruction, Faculty of Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia

P 2.2 in Cross-scale relations in ecology and environmental research

Introduction
Palaeoclimatic records for south-eastern Europe rely largely on loess-palaeosol sequences (LPSS) which in turn play 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 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 comprising a semi-continuous record of the Quaternary palaeoclimate.

Material & Methods
The LPSS of the Lower Danube and the Carpathian Basin allow the analysis of temporal and spatial trends in Pleistocene palaeoclimate, even on hemispheric scales. However, the general temporal resolution of the LPSS seems mostly limited to (sub)deca-millennial (orbital) scales. Magnetic susceptibility (χ, χfd) and grain size (GS) became fundamental palaeoclimate proxies in loess research. Recent studies on GS trends across the CLP reveal Late Pleistocene palaeoclimatic fluctuations on millennial scale which correlate to the Dansgaard-Oeschger events known from the Greenland Ice Cores. Such millennial scale variations were up to date not observed in Late Pleistocene Danube LPSS. In order to investigate the potential of Danube loess in recording millennial palaeoclimate variability, Late Pleistocene LPSS from the southern Carpathian Basin and the eastern Lower Danube Basin were sampled in high resolution.

Results & Conclusions
Based on the down-section variability of palaeoclimatic proxy parameters we can draw the following conclusions:

  • χfd largely resembles the O-isotope record from Greenland Ice Cores providing a multi-millennial time scale.
  • On this time scale, the GS-trend correlates surprisingly well to the Greenland dust proxy record suggesting a persistent North Atlantic sea surface temperature control of western Eurasian climate.


Keywords: Palaeoclimate, SE Europe, Late Pleistocene, loess-palaeosol sequences, Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events, Greenland Ice Cores (GIC)
This site makes use of cookies More information
✖