No sedimentary evidence for hydrothermal refugia in the Plio-Pleistocene deposits of the Baza Basin (SE Spain)

Refining upon the climatic background of the Early Pleistocene hominid settlement in western Europe: Barranco León and Fuente Nueva-3 (Guadix-Baza Basin, SE Spain)

“…An overall comparison suggests that the climate was warmer with mild winters and that the level of precipitation was higher than today, particularly during winter and spring. It is noteworthy here that such a direct comparison, especially for temperature, between our results and the modern data should be contextualised by the fact that during the Early Pleistocene the region may well have been some 200 m below its present elevation, given the uplift of the Betic Cordillera (Gibert et al, 2015;García-Aguilar et al, 2014.…”

A reassessment of the evidence for hydrothermal activity in the Neogene-Quaternary lacustrine environments of the Baza basin (Betic Cordillera, SE Spain) and its paleoecological implications

“…The model of interconnected sub-environments proposed by Gibert et al (2015) as an alternative to our six lacustrine stages for the sedimentary infilling of the Baza basin is weakly supported, because it considers lateral changes in facies (e.g., marly-evaporitic sediments and carbonate deposits) between depositional environments that did not coexist in time (Vera, 1970;García-Aguilar and Martín, 2000): sulphate-rich sedimentation is typical of the Gelasian while carbonate-rich deposits characterize the Calabrian (García-Aguilar and Palmqvist, 2011) (Fig. 1B).…”

“…For this reason, we think that their reinterpretation of the geochemical and mineralogical anomalies as "generated during the sedimentation and early diagenesis, in an evaporitic sedimentary environment fed by CaeHCO 3 -rich waters evolving to SO 4rich brines during evaporation" is wrong. Gibert et al (2015) criticize that their paleomagnetic data were ignored in our chronostratigraphic framework for the lacustrine stages, which was based on the magnetostratigraphy of Garc es -Rossell, 1975) that are nowadays active in the Betic Cordillera, southern Spain. In fact, magnesium clays, celestine, strontium and native sulfur do not distribute homogeneously in the lacustrine sediments, but are concentrated in areas placed in the vicinity of hot springs that are active today, or in zones that can be interpreted as hot springs active during the Plio-Pleistocene (Fig.…”

“…Gibert et al (2015) criticize that their paleomagnetic data were ignored in our chronostratigraphic framework for the lacustrine stages, which was based on the magnetostratigraphy of Garc es -Rossell, 1975) that are nowadays active in the Betic Cordillera, southern Spain. In any case, the criticism of Gibert et al (2015) that we ignore their papers can also be applied to them, as they indicate that the period of continental sedimentation in the Baza basin "finished during the Middle Pleistocene (~0.6 Ma)", in spite of a number of studies that have confidently placed this event later, in the late Middle Pleistocene at~0.2 Ma (García-Tortosa et al, 2008), or during the Late Pleistocene (100e17 ka: Viseras and Fern andez, 1992;Calvache and Viseras, 1997;42 ka: Azañ on et al, 2006). Water output temperatures range between 18 and 60 C. The rectangle indicates the studied area (Baza basin).…”

“…However, Gibert et al (2015) argue in this volume that geological evidence for hydrothermal activity in the saline lake system of the Baza basin is weak and offer in their Fig. 1 an alternative model that considers three interconnected sub-environments (inner, intermediate and marginal) for the whole interval of lacustrine sedimentation (for a more in depth explanation of this model, see Gibert et al, 2007).…”