Quaternary science 2007: a 50-year retrospective

Abstract

This paper reviews 50 years of progress in understanding the recent history of the Earth as contained within the stratigraphical record of the Quaternary. It describes some of the major technological and methodological advances that have occurred in Quaternary geochronology; examines the impressive range of palaeoenvironmental evidence that has been assembled from terrestrial, marine and cryospheric archives; assesses the progress that has been made towards an understanding of Quaternary climatic variability; discusses the development of numerical modelling as a basis for explaining and predicting climatic and environmental change; and outlines the present status of the Quaternary in relation to the geological time scale. The review concludes with a consideration of the global Quaternary community and the challenge for the future.

The role of geodiversity in delivering ecosystem services and benefits in Scotland

“…Quaternary studies have a vital role to play in this respect (Walker & Lowe 2007;Clague 2008), particularly proxy records for the Holocene which are generally more detailed, better dated and show greater resolution than those for earlier time periods. Such records should enable observed or projected changes in both the geomorphological (Higgitt & Lee 2001;Hansom 2001;Wohl & Rathburn 2013) and ecological (Willis et al 2007(Willis et al , 2010Froyd & Willis 2008;Davies & Bunting 2010) components of ecosystems to be evaluated in the context of past environmental variability.…”

Using SHEBI (SHE Analysis For Biozone Identification): To Proceed From The Top Down Or The Bottom Up? A Discussion Using Two Miocene Foraminiferal Successions From Trinidad, West Indies

“…While organisms might migrate into and out of the area (Murray, 1983), at least some of the fauna is going to be derived from the preexisting community at that site (Berryman, 1999). Micropaleontologists examining an outcrop might reason that, by following the bottom-upward (i.e., superpositional) order of samples and by following the maxim that the present is the product of the past (see Walker and Lowe, 2007), they are better able to infer paleoenvironmental trends from changes in the foraminiferal community. Such an approach, in which ABs are treated as successive ecostratigraphic units, follows the direction of historical cause and effect.…”

A Humboldtian approach to life and climate of the geological past: Estimating palaeotemperature from dental traits of mammalian communities

“…The Pleistocene started when a global cooling trend of the late Pliocene had reached a point after which periodical glaciation events started in the Northern hemisphere, following cyclic changes in the orbit and axis orientation of the Earth (Walker & Lowe, ). Since then, the climate oscillated between the extremes of cold glacial maxima and warm interglacial stages in the Northern hemisphere.…”

“…The Pleistocene started when a global cooling trend of the late Pliocene had reached a point after which periodical glaciation events started in the Northern hemisphere, following cyclic changes in the orbit and axis orientation of the Earth (Walker & Lowe, 2007). Since NPP is computed from MAT and MAP using equations from Lieth (1975) as reported by Liu et al (2012).…”