The entrance of Earth's climate into the present icehouse state during a time of rapid temperature decline in the late Pliocene was intensively investigated during the past decade. Even though it is well documented in marine archives, detailed reconstruction of the Pliocene-Pleistocene climatic evolution of central Europe is hampered by a general lack of data. The work presented here is based on sedimentary material from drill cores obtained at three sites within the Heidelberg Basin (Germany). The scientific relevance of this unique archive was discovered only in the last decade. The hundreds of metres thick sequences of mainly fluvial sediments record the evolution of the environment and climatic conditions during the late Pliocene and the entire Pleistocene of western central Europe. In our present study, we implement unpublished mineral magnetic S-ratio data and new evidence from X-ray analysis into two previously completed studies on the magnetic polarity stratigraphy and the magnetic mineralogy of the Pliocene to Pleistocene sediments of the Heidelberg Basin. The total set of data enable distinction of environmental and climatic processes, and unveil details on the climatic conditions of continental Europe during this period. We demonstrate the dominance of an Mediterranean type to subtropical type climate during the Pliocene. Cyclic variations in the groundwater table in the Rhine flood plain resulted in redox fluctuations, which led to the decomposition of the primary detrital mineral assemblage. Authigenic Fe oxides, particularly haematite, formed during dry periods. A rapid transition into cooler and moister conditions occurred at the end of the Pliocene, as indicated by the persistence of Fe sulphides, especially greigite. A high groundwater table and the associated reducing conditions have largely persisted to the present day. We show that the rapid transition from warm to cooler and moister climatic conditions in central Europe during the final Pliocene is a regional response to the intensification of Northern Hemisphere glaciation (iNHG). This work supplements existing knowledge of the climatic evolution of central Europe during the Pliocene-Pleistocene transition by data from a region from which little data has been available. A sideglance to climatic archives elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere (e.g., North Atlantic Ocean, Chinese Loess Plateau, Russian arctic) is used to show the coincidence of the iNHG events in quite different environmental regimes.
This work presents the results of a magnetostratigraphic survey performed on 1150 m of core material from three sites within the Heidelberg Basin. The cores intersect one of the thickest continuous accumulations of Plio-Pleistocene fluvial sediments in western Central Europe. The resultant magnetic polarity stratigraphy includes every Quaternary polarity chron, thereby providing constant age constraint down to the Gauss-Matuyama Boundary (2.58 Ma). Older deposits cannot be unequivocally dated; instead, various age-depth models are discussed. We base our chronostratigraphic interpretation of the successions tentatively on three assumptions. A) The accommodation was almost constant over time. B) Hiatuses in the duration of subchrons (on the order of 0.2 Myr) may occur, and the actual step-like age-depth relationship is best depicted as a smooth curve with almost constant slope. C) Long chrons and subchrons have a higher preservation potential than shorter polarity intervals. The stratigraphic scenarios with the highest probability - based upon our three assumptions- lead to minimum ages of > 5.235 Ma and > 4.187 Ma for the oldest parts of the Viernheim and Heidelberg cores, respectively. Consequently, this study provides the first consistent magnetic polarity stratigraphy for quasi-continuous sequences of late Neogene to Quaternary fluvial sediments in the Rhine Basin and generally in western central Europe. This methodologically independent chronostratigraphy supplies an urgently required temporal model for on-going tectonic and sedimentological studies and the reconstruction of the palaeoclimate since the Pliocene in this part of Europe.