Terrestrial archives in the Mediterranean

摘要

The research of Quaternary climate and environmental change has more and more turned into a transdisciplinary science field in recent years. This Quaternary International special volume, Terrestrial archives in the Mediterranean, will focus on Mediterranean past climate and environmental change during the Last Glacial and Ho-locene. We invited authors from different disciplines of Quaternary research, who are working on different terrestrial archive types (e.g. fluvial deposits, mollusk assemblages, glaciers, lacustrine deposits, etc.). The initial idea for this Quaternary International special issue arises at the XVIII INQUA congress in Bern in July 2011. An important matter of the session, From the Western Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea: A corridor of palaeoenvironmental change and human response during the last 30.000 years, was reflecting on the comparability of the presented archives, taking into account that the comparability can be markedly limited. In many cases, terrestrial settings do not feature continuous archives as do marine cores. Therefore, the chronological resolution of this archive types is often limited, and palaeoclimatic correlations are challenging. However, only terrestrial archives allow local to regional reconstructions on past human-environment interactions. Terrestrial archive studies intend to reconstruct paleoenvironment and paleoclimate by means of different proxy data. Even if terrestrial archives have a strong climatic relevance (e.g. pollen or mollusc assemblages) there are numerous factors other than climate that strongly influence the construction/aggradation of a peat bog or a floodplain. Therefore, straight interpretation on climatic control is not always useful and more caution could be helpful in many cases.