Environmental changes in the Bukovyna Upland during the last interglacial – early glacial (founded on the study of clastic deposits of the Tovtry cave)

Abstract

Results of pollen and lithological studies of clastic deposits from the Tovtry cave show vegetational and climatic changes during the last interglacial and early glacial in the south-eastern part of the Bukovyna piedmont of the Ukrainian Carpathians. The Tovtry cave is located in the Bukovyna Upland, in the cliff of the tributary of the Dniester River valley (220 m a. s. l.). The modern vegetational zone here is Carpinus-Quercus forests, but local vegetation is a mesophytic steppe with some pine patches. The cave is a vertical well worked out in the Neogene gypsum strata (Ridush, 2013).

The regional type locality of the last interglacial and early glacial is the Kolodiiv peatbog (Gurtovaya, 1983; Bezusko et al., 2011), situated much closer to the mountains than the Tovtry site. The pollen study of the last interglacial palaeosols and early glacial deposits in the Middle Dniester valley has been intensely carried out (Bolikhovskaya, 1995; Bolikhovskaya, Pashkevich, 1982; Komar, 2012; Gerasimenko et al., 2016). Sub-terrain deposits of these units were studied at Tovtry first, and they included the grain-size analysis (Avdieienko, 2015, 2019).