Eemian interglacial

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Eemian interglacial

Eemian, once called the Eemian Interglacial period, is temporally equivalent to the Sangamonian Stage

Sangamonian Stage

The Sangamonian Stage, also known as the Sangamon interglacial, is the name used by Quaternary geologists to designate the last interglacial period in North America....
(sensu stricto) in North America

North America

North America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and almost totally in the western hemisphere....
, the Ipswichian Stage in the UK

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom , the UK or Britain,is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe....
, and the Riss-Würm interglacial in the Alps

Alps

The Alps is the name for one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east; through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany; to France in the west....
. This stage is second-to-latest interglacial period of the Ice Age

Ice age

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Eemian, once called the Eemian Interglacial period, is temporally equivalent to the Sangamonian Stage

Sangamonian Stage

North America

North America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and almost totally in the western hemisphere....
, the Ipswichian Stage in the UK

United Kingdom

Alps

Ice age

The general term "ice age" or, more precisely, "glacial age" denotes a geological period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in an expansion of continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers....
. It began about 130,000 years ago. Changes in orbital parameters from today (greater obliquity and eccentricity, and perihelion), known as the Milankovitch cycle, probably led to greater seasonal temperature variations in the Northern Hemisphere, although global annual means temperatures were probably similar to those of the Holocene. The Eemian climate is believed to have been about as stable as, but probably warmer than, that of the Holocene

Holocene

The Holocene is a geological Epoch which began approximately 11,700 years ago . According to traditional geological thinking, the Holocene continues to the present....
(see ice core

Ice core

An ice core is a core sample from the accumulation of snow and ice over many years that have re-crystallized and have trapped air bubbles from previous time periods....
). The warmest peak of the Eemian was around 125,000 years ago, when forests reached as far north as North Cape

North Cape, Norway

North Cape is a Headlands and bays on the island of Mager?ya in northern Norway, in the municipality of Nordkapp. Its 307 m high, steep cliff is often referred to as the northernmost point of Europe, located at , 2102.3 km from the North Pole....
(which is now tundra

Tundra

In physical geography, tundra is an biome where the tree growth is hindered by low temperatures and short growing seasons. The term tundra comes from Kildin Sami tund?r, which means "uplands, treeless mountain tract." There are two types of tundra: Arctic tundra and alpine tundra....
) in northern Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a constitutional monarchy in Northern Europe that occupies the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula....
well above the Arctic Circle at . Hardwood

Hardwood

The term hardwood is used to describe wood from non-monocot flowering plant trees and for those trees themselves. These are usually broad-leaved; in temperate and boreal latitudes they are mostly deciduous, but in tropics and subtropics mostly evergreen....
trees like hazel

Hazel

The hazels are a genus of deciduous trees and large shrubs native to the temperate northern hemisphere. The genus is usually placed in the birch family Betulaceae, though some botanists split the hazels into a separate family Corylaceae.Hazel plants prefer a nice warm, mild,moist climate nothing more nothing less....
and oak

Oak

The term oak can be used as part of the common name of any of about 400 species of trees and shrubs in the genus Quercus , which are listed in the List of Quercus species, and some related genera, notably Lithocarpus....
grew as far north as Oulu

Oulu

Oulu is a List of cities and towns in Finland and Municipalities of Finland of inhabitants in the Provinces of Finland of Oulu and the region of Northern Ostrobothnia, in Finland....
, Finland

Finland

Finland , officially the Republic of Finland , is a Nordic countries situated in the Fennoscandian region of northern Europe. It borders Sweden on the west, Russia on the east, and Norway on the north, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland....
. Sea levels at that time were 4-6 meters higher than they are now, indicating greater deglaciation than today (mostly from partial melting of the ice sheet

Ice sheet

An ice sheet is a mass of glacier ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 square kilometer . The only current ice sheets are in Antarctica and Greenland; during the last glacial period at Last Glacial Maximum the Laurentide ice sheet covered much of Canada and North America, the Wisconsin glaciation ice sheet covered n...
s of Greenland

Greenland

Greenland is a member country of the Kingdom of Denmark located between the Arctic Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago....
and Antarctica

Antarctica

Antarctica is Earth's southernmost continent, overlying the South Pole. It is situated in the Antarctica of the southern hemisphere, almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle, and is surrounded by the Southern Ocean....
). One study published in July 2007 found evidence that Dye 3

Dye 3

Dye 3 is an ice core site and previously part of the DEW line, located at in Greenland.As a Distant Early Warning line base, it was disbanded in years 1990/1991....
was glaciated during the Eemian, which implies that Greenland could have contributed at most to sea level rise. Scandinavia

Scandinavia

Scandinavia is a historical and geographical subregion in northern Europe that includes the Scandinavian Peninsula. It consists of the kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; some authorities also include Finland and some might even include Iceland....
was an island due to the inundation of vast areas of northern Europe

Northern Europe

Northern Europe is the northern part or region of Europe. The United Nations defines Northern Europe as including the following countries and dependent regions:...
and the West Siberian Plain

West Siberian Plain

The West Siberian Plain is a large plain that occupies the western portion of Siberia and Russia, between the Ural Mountains in the west and the Yenisei River in the east, and by the Eastern Sayan Mountains and the Baikal Mountains on the south....
.

At the peak of the Eemian, the northern hemisphere winters were generally warmer and wetter than now, though some areas were actually slightly cooler than today. Trees grew as far north as southern Baffin Island

Baffin Island

Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut is the largest member of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. It is the List of Canadian islands by area and the List of islands by area, with an area of and has a population of 11,000 ....
in the Canadian

Canada

Canada is a country occupying most of northern North America, extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west and northward into the Arctic Ocean....
Arctic Archipelago instead of only as far north as Kuujjuaq in northern Quebec

Quebec

Quebec , in French language, Qu?bec , is a Provinces and territories of Canada in the Central Canada and Eastern Canada regions of Canada....
, and the prairie-forest boundary in the Great Plains

Great Plains

The Great Plains are the broad expanse of prairie and steppe which lie west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada....
of the United States

United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
lay further west — near Lubbock, Texas

Lubbock, Texas

Lubbock is an United States of America city in the U.S. state of Texas. Located in the West Texas part of the state, a region known historically as the Llano Estacado, it is the county seat of Lubbock County, Texas, and the home of Texas Tech University....
, instead of near Dallas, Texas

Dallas, Texas

Dallas is the third largest city in the state of Texas and the List of United States cities by population in the United States.The city, with a population of over 1.3 million, is the main economic center of the 12-county Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex which contains 6.1 million people, and is the fourth-largest United States metropolitan area...
, where the boundary now exists. The era closed as temperatures steadily fell to conditions cooler and drier than the present, with 468-year long aridity pulse in central Europe, and by 114,000 years ago, a glacial era had returned.

Kaspar et al. (GRL, 2005) perform a comparison of a coupled general circulation model (GCM) with reconstructed Eemian temperatures for Europe. Central Europe (north of the Alps) is found to be 1–2 °C

Celsius

Celsius is a temperature scale that is named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius , who developed a similar temperature scale two years before his death....
warmer than present; south of the alps conditions are 1–2 °C cooler than today. The model (forced with observed GHG concentrations and Eemian orbital parameters) generally reproduces these observations, and hence they conclude that these factors are enough to explain the Eemian temperatures.

Definition of the Eemian

The Eemian Stage was first recognized from borehole

Borehole

A borehole is the generalised term for any narrow Shaft mining drilled in the ground, either vertically or horizontally. A borehole may be constructed for many different purposes including the extraction of water or other liquid or gases , as part of a geotechnical investigation or Phase I Environmental Site Assessment#Other types of ESA, fo...
s in the area of the city of Amersfoort

Amersfoort

Media:Nl-Amersfoort.ogg is a municipality and the second largest city of the province of Utrecht in central Netherlands. The city is growing quickly and has a well-preserved medieval core....
(The Netherlands) by Harting (1875). He named the beds "Système Eémien", after the river Eem

Eem

The Eem is a river in the north of the Utrecht in the Netherlands with a length of approximately .The river is fed by the Vallei Canal and a number of Veluwe creeks, the most important of which are the Heiligenberger, the Barneveldse and the Lunterse, all of which come together in Amersfoort....
on which Amersfoort is located. Harting noticed the marine molluscan assemblages to be very different from the modern fauna that occurs in the North Sea

North Sea

The North Sea is a marginal sea, epeiric sea on the European continental shelf. The Dover Strait and the English Channel in the south and the Norwegian Sea in the north connect it to the Atlantic Ocean....
. Many species from the Eemian layers nowadays show a much more southern distribution, ranging from South of the Strait of Dover

Strait of Dover

The Strait of Dover or Dover Strait is the strait at the narrowest part of the English Channel. The shortest distance across the strait is from the South Foreland, some 6 kilometres north-east of Dover in the county of Kent, England, to Cap Gris Nez, a Headlands and bays near to Calais in the French of Pas-de-Calais, Franc...
, to Portugal

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic , is a country on the Iberian Peninsula. Located in southwestern Europe, Portugal is the westernmost country of mainland Europe and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east....
(Lusitanian

Lusitanian

Lusitanian may refer to:*Lusitanians, an ancient people of western Iberian Peninsula.**Lusitanian language, the language of the ancient Lusitanians....
faunal province) and even into the Mediterranean (Mediterranean faunal province). More information about the molluscan assemblages is given by Lorié (1887), and Spaink (1958). Since its discovery, Eemian beds in the Netherlands have mainly been recognized on their marine molluscan content combined with their stratigraphical position and other palaeontology. In the type-area the marine beds are often underlain by till

Till

Till is unsorted glacier sediment. Glacial drift is a general term for the coarsely graded and extremely heterogeneous sediments of glacial origin....
s that are considered to date from the Saalian, and overlain by local fresh water or wind-blown deposits from the Weichselian. Contrary to for instance the deposits in Denmark, the Eemian deposits in the type area have never been found overlain by tills, nor in ice-pushed position.
Van Voorthuysen (1958) described the foraminifera

Foraminifera

The Foraminifera, or forams for short, are a large group of amoeboid protists with reticulating pseudopods, fine strands of cytoplasm that branch and merge to form a dynamic net....
from the type site, whereas Zagwijn (1961) published the palynology

Palynology

Palynology is the science that studies contemporary and fossil palynomorphs, including pollen, spores, dinoflagellate cysts, acritarchs, chitinozoans and Scolecodontss, together with particulate organic matter and kerogen found in sedimentary rocks and sediments....
, providing a subdivision of this stage into pollenstages. At the end of the twentieth century, the type site was re-investigated using old and new data in a multi-disciplinary approach (Cleveringa et al., 2000). At the same time a parastratotype was selected and multidisciplinary investigated in the Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the Capital of the Netherlands and List of cities in the Netherlands with over 100,000 people of the Netherlands, located in the Provinces of the Netherlands of North Holland in the west of the country....
glacial basin in the Amsterdam-Terminal borehole (Van Leeuwen, et al., 2000). These authors also published a U/Th age for late Eemian deposits from this borehole of 118.2 ±6.3 Ka. A historical review of Dutch Eemian research is provided by Bosch, Cleveringa and Meijer, 2000.

Sea level

Sea level at peak was probably 4-6m higher than today (references in Overpeck et al., 2006), with much of this exttra water coming from Greenland but some likely to have come from Antarctica. Global mean sea surface temperature

Sea surface temperature

Sea surface temperature is the water temperature close to the surface.In practical terms, the exact meaning of surface varies according to the measurement method used....
s are not thought to have been significantly higher than in the Holocene, hence the thermal expansion difference from today is small. Because of the sea level drop since the Eemian, exposed fossil coral reefs are common in the tropics, especially in the Caribbean and along the Red Sea coastlines. These reefs often contain internal erosion surfaces showing significant sea level instability during the Eemian.

Ipswichian Stage

This name is used by British geologist

Geologist

For other uses, see Geologist .A geologist is a contributor to the science of geology, studying the physical structure and processes of the Earth and planets of the solar system ....
s and archaeologists who named it after the town of Ipswich

Ipswich

Ipswich is a non-metropolitan district and the county town of Suffolk, England on the estuary of the River Orwell. Nearby towns are Felixstowe in Suffolk, Harwich in Essex and Colchester also in Essex....
in the English county of Suffolk

Suffolk

Suffolk is a Non-metropolitan counties of England of Historic counties of England in East Anglia, England. It has borders with Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south....
, where some of the deposits it created were first found.

External links

Muhs, D. R., 2006, U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, colorado

Eemian interglacial

Definition of the Eemian

Sea level

Ipswichian Stage

See also

External links

Further reading