Climatic reconstructions from the Eemian/Early Weichselian transition in Central Europe based on the coleopteran record from Gröbern, Germany

• Published in: Boreas
• Main Authors: WALKLING, ADRIAN P., COOPE, G. RUSSELL
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 1996
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1502-3885.1996.tb00843.x; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1502-3885.1996.tb00843.x; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1502-3885.1996.tb00843.x

At Grobern (51°52′N, 12°6′E, altitude 94–98 m a.s.l., 50km north of Leipzig), a succession of lacustrine sediments has yielded a fossil coleopterous fauna permitting the reconstruction of climatic conditions through out the Eemian/Early Weichselian transition. In accord with other indicators, the Coleoptera show that this period was characterized by three major climatic oscillations during which the thermal climate fluctuated between conditions of arctic severity and more temperate conditions. During the cold episodes, the beetle faunas were dominated by species which today have exclusively northern or even Asiatic ranges. In the intervening warm periods these cold‐adapted species were absent and the faunas included temperate species some of which are tree‐dependent. Quantitative palaeotemperature estimates using the Mutual Climatic Range method, show that the mean July temperatures during the relatively colder intervals were 5°C to 6°C lower than during the warmer periods, but the depression of winter temperatures during the colder periods was much greater than this. Because different species of Coleoptera have different thresholds of temperature tolerance, their indications of climatic change do not always coincide with the changes in the lithology or pollen.