Chapter 104: Pleistocene Part 2

Another loess-paleosol succession occurs in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Austria, where loess blankets terraces of the major rivers that drained eastward and southward from the principal glaciated areas in the Alps and northern Europe.

  As in China, buried soils are common in the loess succession and, along with gastropod shells, provide paleoclimatic data and evidence for climatic change.

  The climatic cycles varied from cold and dry conditions when loess accumulated to warm and wet conditions with hardwood forests and well-developed soils. In the last 730,000 years, eight climatic cycles have been delineated; these correlate with the eight oxygen-18 cycles that occurred in the marine record during the same time interval. 

During the entire Pleistocene, about 17 glacial episodes alternated with 17 interglacials.