Lowe Joseph John - Reconstructing Quaternary Environments

This third edition of Reconstructing Quaternary Environments has been completely revised and updated to provide a new account of the history and scale of environmental changes during the Quaternary. The evidence is extremely diverse ranging from landforms and sediments to fossil assemblages and geochemistry, and includes new data from terrestrial, marine and ice-core records. Dating methods are described and evaluated, while the principles and practices of Quaternary stratigraphy are also discussed. The volume concludes with a new chapter which considers some of the key questions about the nature, causes and consequences of global climatic and environmental change over a range of temporal scales. This synthesis builds on the methods and approaches described earlier in the book to show how a number of exciting ideas that have emerged over the last two decades are providing new insights into the operation of the global earthoceanatmosphere system, and are now central to many areas of contemporary Quaternary research.

This comprehensive and dynamic textbook is richly illustrated throughout with full-colour figures and photographs. The book will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals in Earth Science, Environmental Science, Physical Geography, Geology, Botany, Zoology, Ecology, Archaeology and Anthropology.

John Lowe is former Gordon Manley Professor and now Emeritus Professor of Quaternary Science in Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

Mike Walker is Emeritus Professor of Quaternary Science, Trinity Saint David, University of Wales, Lampeter, UK and Honorary Professor, Aberystwyth University, UK.

For all our colleagues in the INTIMATE project

(INTegration of Ice-core, MArine and TErrestrial records)

First published 1984

by Longman Group Ltd

Second edition 1997

by Addison Wesley Longman Ltd

Third edition published 2015

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1984, 1997, 2015 John Lowe and Mike Walker

The right of John Lowe and Mike Walker to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lowe, J. J. (Joseph John)

Reconstructing quaternary environments / John Lowe and

Mike Walker. Third edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Geology, StratigraphicQuaternary. 2. Paleogeography

Quaternary. 3. Geomorphology. I. Walker, Mike. II. Title.

QE696.L776 2014

551.79dc23

2013044728

ISBN: 978-0-415-74075-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-131-27468-6 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-79749-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Minion and Univers

by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

Looking again at the Preface to the second edition of Reconstructing Quaternary Environments, we get a sense of dja vu. That book took around six years to see the light of day, and we described the gestation period as bordering on the elephantine. How therefore should we describe the time that has been spent on producing this third edition? We began work more than ten years ago, fully intending to do a light touch revision of our 1997 text. But we should have learned our lesson. We said in 1997 that one of the principal causes of delay in delivering a final manuscript had been the enormous volume of Quaternary literature that had appeared in the previous dozen years or so. Since then, the acceleration in the rate of publication has been positively exponential, so much so in fact, that to cover the ground and digest this monumental corpus of material has almost proved to be beyond us. Having just about got away with it this time, our feeling at the moment is that we will be unlikely to take on a fourth edition!

In revising the book, we have retained the tried and tested format that we used in the earlier editions, in which we first review the various forms of evidence (geomorphological, lithological and biological) that comprise the Quaternary record, before moving on to show how we can set this evidence in the context of time (dating) and finally to consider how we can bring all ofthese elements together within a robust stratigraphic framework. But in , we have aimed for something different. In the final chapter of the second edition, we constructed a narrative of events for the last glacial-interglacial cycle in the North Atlantic region. Here we take a broader view and examine a series of themes related to patterns and causes of climate change at a range of spatial scales, and over a series of time intervals that become progressively shorter as we approach the present day. In the 1990s when the second edition of Reconst ructing Quaternary Environments was in preparation, the Quaternary community was still coming to terms with the implications for global palaeoceanography and palaeo-climatology of the deep-ocean marine isotope signal, and the consequent ramifications for subdividing and correlating the Quaternary record. Over the last decade or so, it has been the polar ice-core records that have taken us into new areas of Quaternary science, revealing compelling evidence of the rapidity and frequency of climate changes on millennial, centennial, decadal and, in some cases, annual timescales. In addition, like the marine isotope records before them, they offer a basis for time-stratigraphic subdivision and correlation at regional, hemispherical and global scales. When integrated with the marine records, they afford often startling new insights into the operation of the global oceanatmospherecryosphere system.

A feature of Quaternary science over the past two decades or so has been the emergence of a number of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research groups to investigate some of these short- and long-term climatic changes. As we emphasise throughout the book, cutting-edge Quaternary research involves scientists from a range of different backgrounds, and it is now commonplace to find research collaborations in which oceanographers are involved with ice-core scientists, and isotope geochemists work hand-in-hand with palaeoecologists. And, with the rapid development and refinement of high-powered computers, a key component of these groupings is researchers from the numerical modelling community. Over the past twenty years or so, it has been our pleasure (and privilege) to coordinate two of these multidisciplinary research groups: The North Atlantic Seaboard Programme (19905), which was a constituent component of IGCP-253 Termination of the Pleistocene, and INTIMATE (INTegration of Ice-core, MArine, and TErrestrial Records), initially a Working Group and latterly a Focus Group of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA). At the outset, the focus of INTIMATE was on the North Atlantic province and specifically on events at the end of the Last Cold Stage (