Pleistocene climate fluctuations recorded in the magnetic susceptibility of the most complete East European loess-palaeosol sequences and regional stratigraphic correlation

Abstract

The cyclical structure of loess-palaeosol deposits reflects the patterns of climate change and is a valuable archive of palaeoenvironmental information. The similarity of magnetic susceptibility (MS) variations and other indicators of palaeoclimate (ratio of oxygen isotopes etc.) in coeval marine sediments confirms the viability of palaeoclimatic reconstructions. Additionally, palaeomagnetic methods (magnetostratigraphy) are successfully used in establishing independent chronologies in a wide range of geological archives.

Loess-palaeosol deposits occupy 70% of the territory of Ukraine and are unique in Europe in terms of their stratigraphic completeness. A lack of reliable data from this area, which is exceptionally rich in most complete Quaternary sequences, reduces the quality of overall palaeoclimatic reconstructions. The aim of our work was to correlate the amplitudes of established palaeoclimatic change with those of the global marine oxygen isotope (MIS) scale (Shackleton et al., 1990), performed by rock magnetic and palaeomagnetic research on two key loess-palaeosol sections of Ukraine as well as integration of Ukrainian pedostratigraphy into the pan-Eurasian stratigraphic schemes (Marković et al., 2015; Sümegi et al., 2018).