Middle Pleniglacial pedogenesis on the northwestern edge of the Carpathian basin: A multidisciplinary investigation of the Bíňa pedo-sedimentary section, SW Slovakia
Abstrakt
The Middle Pleniglacial on the northern hemisphere is characterized by millennial scale, frequent, and high amplitude environmental climatic shifts. In loess-paleosol sequences (LPSs) the transition from the Lower (MIS 4) to the Middle Pleniglacial (MIS 3) was accompanied by significant erosion events, as recorded in various terrestrial archives across Central Europe.
As a result, potentially existing paleosol horizons of the particular period have been widely erased from the LPSs and only little is known about pedogenesis in this vast area. This study tries to fill this gap in our knowledge through studying a pedo-sedimentary record from Bíňa, a site situated in a relatively poorly investigated area on the northwestern edge of the Carpathian Basin.
We investigated a 12-m-high and more than 500-m-wide outcrop along the Hron River, where a well-structured sequence of fluvio-lacustrine sediments, paleosols, and loess is preserved. The paleoenvironmental development within the studied area is presented and discussed on the basis of soil micromorphology, rock-magnetic and geochemical measurements, grain size analyses, and a malacological record accomplished by luminescence dating.