Quaternary aminostratigraphies for the eastern North European Plain

TL;DR

This study creates new dating frameworks for sediments in the eastern North European Plain using snail fossils to better understand past climate and human history.

Contribution

The first aminostratigraphies for the eastern North European Plain using snail opercula and IcPD are presented.

Findings

Four new aminostratigraphies were developed covering the last ~1 Ma.

The study evaluated the temporal resolution of IcPD within interglacial periods.

The results provide reference datasets for relative age estimation in the region.

Abstract

The eastern North European Plain is an important area for studying Quaternary climate change and archaeology; however, providing chronological constraints for deposits can be challenging. Amino acid geochronology (AAG) is a relative dating technique that has been useful in correlating isolated Quaternary deposits. The intra-crystalline protein decomposition (IcPD) approach to AAG using the opercula of
Bithynia snails has previously been used to provide relative dating frameworks across northern and central Europe in areas where the integrated diagenetic temperature can be assumed to be similar. Here, the first aminostratigraphies for the eastern North European Plain are presented, incorporating deposits from at least the last ~1 Ma, which are used to assess the current age attributions to Middle and Late Pleistocene interglacials. These aminostratigraphies are then used to explore expected differences in the extent of IcPD due to differing temperature histories across the study area. Correlations of opercula to regional pollen assemblages representative of the Holsteinian, Eemian and Holocene are used to evaluate the temporal resolution achievable by IcPD within a given interglacial. This work has produced four new aminostratigraphies that can now be used as reference datasets for relative age estimation for the late Middle Pleistocene to the Holocene in the eastern North European Plain.

The eastern North European Plain is an important region for studying past climate change over the last million years. In this area, the climate has cycled between cold periods (when ice sheets covered most of the region) and warm periods (when sea levels were much higher than today). Records of these changes are preserved in sediments, but to understand when and how these dramatic shifts in climate occurred, these need to be dated. This can be challenging, as most dating techniques do not extend this far back in time, or the sediments lack the material required for dating. In this study, we have used amino acid geochronology on fossil snails to place these sediments in relative order of age and to narrow down the period during which they were deposited. The work establishes four new chronological frameworks that can be used as references for future studies of the Quaternary period (the last 2.6 million years). This will enable us to better understand the effects of past climate change in the eastern North European Plain on the animals and plants that existed during this time, including Palaeolithic humans.

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