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The Last Three Millions of Unequal Spring Thaws

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Nature through Time

Abstract

Evidence from various climate proxies provides us with increasingly reliable proof that only in the past 10 millennia were natural systems more or less as we see them at the present (without considering human impact). Prior to 10,000 years ago, natural systems repeatedly changed under the influence of an unstable climate. This is particularly true over the last one million years. During these times, terrestrial environments were populated by a diversity of large animals that did not survive either the last dramatic climate change or the increasing power of humans. The volume of continental ice covering the land and its impact on the planet’s physiography∗ and vegetation have varied consistently. We can try to imagine extreme conditions: the very cold springtimes of the full glacials∗, and the warm springtimes of the rapid deglaciation phases, with enormous volumes of water feeding terrifying rivers. Most of this story is frozen in the ice cover of Greenland and Antarctica, the deep layers of which have been reached by human coring activities only over the past half century. Shorter cores have been drilled in high-altitude ice caps (e.g., in the Andes) that provide insight into other parts of the planet. The interpretation of the signals locked into the ice cores led to the reconstruction of climatic curves covering approximately the past 800 millennia. In addition, long sediment cores have been recovered from thousands of lakes across the globe and yielded data useful to estimate climatic trends based on pollen* records. In the past one to three million years, the continents and oceans were in roughly their present-day locations. Environmental factors, including tectonics (mountain uplift or closure of ocean gateways), interacted with the overall long-term oscillation in atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration, which, in turn, influenced vegetation cover and ecosystem composition. Well-established glacial-interglacial∗ cycles impacted biotic dispersal∗ events at mid-to-high latitudes and determined the geographical restriction and expansion of tropical and subtropical (warm-temperate) biomes around the globe. This book chapter constitutes an imaginary field trip, presenting the reader with exemplary records of environments, plants, large mammals, and hominins impacted by cooling and warming phases, glaciations, changes in rainfall patterns, and sea level culminating in the world of today.

Electronic supplementary material

A slide presentation and an explanation of each slide’s content is freely available to everyone upon request via email to one of the editors: edoardo.martinetto@unito.it, ragastal@colby.edu, tschopp.e@gmail.com

*The asterisk designates terms explained in the Glossary.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The U-codes are referred to the slides provided as Electronic supplementary material.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to E Hakobyan for the help in the preparation of text and images, to R Sardella for useful information about vertebrate fossil assemblages of Europe, to C Scotese for the permission to use his paleogeographic map, and to TK Akabane, K Ashastina, JF Barcelona, C Benigni, M Costea, H Hooghiemstra, JTF Guimaeres, DL Nickrent, P Mazza, K Nixon, and PB Pelser for the photographs provided. Special thanks to Soprintendenza Speciale Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio (SSABAP) of Rome for allowing us to use images of the Polledrara di Cecanibbio site without charges.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Edoardo Martinetto & Franco Gianotti

  2. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Adele Bertini

  3. Paleo Labo Co. Ltd., Toda, Saitama, Japan

    Sudarshan Bhandari

  4. ROCEEH Research Centre, Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, Frankfurt/M, Germany

    Angela A. Bruch

  5. Soprintendenza Speciale Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio di Roma, Rome, Italy

    Eugenio Cerilli

  6. Department of Physics and Geology, University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

    Marco Cherin

  7. School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Judith H. Field

  8. Department of Higher Plant Systematic and Geography, Institute of Botany after A. Takhtajan of NAS RA, Yerevan, Armenia

    Ivan Gabrielyan

  9. Institute of Geoscience, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Andrea K. Kern

  10. Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, Research Station of Quaternary Palaeontology, Weimar, Germany

    Frank Kienast

  11. La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Emily L. Lindsey

  12. Graduate School of Horticulture, Chiba University, Matsudo, Chiba, Japan

    Arata Momohara

  13. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Istituto per la Dinamica dei Processi Ambientali, Laboratorio di Palinologia e Paleoecologia, Milan, Italy

    Cesare Ravazzi

  14. British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Cambridge, UK

    Elizabeth R. Thomas

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    Edoardo Martinetto

  2. Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA

    Emanuel Tschopp

  3. Department of Geology, Colby College, Waterville, ME, USA

    Robert A. Gastaldo

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Martinetto, E. et al. (2020). The Last Three Millions of Unequal Spring Thaws. In: Martinetto, E., Tschopp, E., Gastaldo, R.A. (eds) Nature through Time. Springer Textbooks in Earth Sciences, Geography and Environment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35058-1_1

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