Waldo Heliodoor Zagwijn (1928–2018): the instigator and architect of European chronostratigraphy

Abstract

On 26 June 2018 Waldo Heliodoor Zagwijn died at the age of 89. He was an Emeritus Professor of the Faculty of Earth Sciences, Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. As a geologist, palynologist and palaeobotanist he focused on developing a stratigraphy of the Netherlands based on changes in vegetation and climate. The Dutch setting of a subsiding basin, and the clear signal of a sequence of glacial–interglacial cycles, was promising. As early as the late 1950s it became clear that the Quaternary Period included more than the previously assumed four ice ages in the Netherlands. In his PhD thesis Zagwijn defined the start of the Quaternary around 2.5 million years before the present (2.5 Ma). The international community accepted Zagwijn’s arguments after he retired. He showed how the rivers Meuse, Scheldt and Rhine had built the Netherlands in four dimensions. He is the instigator and architect of the climate- and chronostratigraphy of the Quaternary Period of Western Europe.

60 years of scientific deep drilling in Colombia: the north Andean guide to the Quaternary

“…However, continental evidence showed ∼ 2.5 Ma as a logical start of the Quaternary, with a first ice age of significant cooling (Zagwijn, 1960(Zagwijn, , 1992, which caused controversial opinions and debates on the beginning of the Quaternary in the paleoecological community. The debate between proxies continued for half a century (see also Hooghiemstra and Hoek, 2019), but terrestrial arguments eventually provided conclusive evi- dence for the start of the Quaternary at 2.59 Ma (Gibbard et al, 2010). Marine and ice core drilling projects developed rapidly into research consortia of global relevance.…”