Quantitative Climate Signals in European Loess–Palaeosol Systems: Insights from Modern Soil Calibration
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Loess–palaeosol sequences (LPS) preserve some of the most continuous terrestrial records of Pleistocene environmental change and are central archives for reconstructing past climate dynamics across Eurasia. However, robust quantitative palaeoclimate reconstruction requires better-constrained proxy systems and improved understanding of how soil properties respond to climatic and hydrological forcing across environmental gradients. This study evaluates the climatic sensitivity and transferability of commonly applied loess proxies using modern loess-derived topsoils from the Upper Danube Basin (Germany) and Middle Danube Basin (Serbia). These regions span contrasting temperature and precipitation regimes and therefore provide a natural framework for testing soil–climate relationships under different environmental conditions. The dataset combines rock magnetic parameters, colour indices, and grain-size distributions analysed through both single-proxy and multivariate statistical approaches. Our results show that individual proxies capture climate-related variability only moderately well, whereas multi-proxy transfer functions significantly improve predictive performance. At the same time, strong regional dependencies and nonlinear proxy behaviour indicate that magnetic signals are partly influenced by local effects including heterogenous sediment sources, pedogenesis, and possible erosion-related disturbance of modern surface soils. These findings demonstrate both the potential and limitations of widely used loess-based climate proxies, particularly when applied across large spatial scales where substantial variations in sediment provenance may obscure climatic signal. Ongoing work extends this calibration framework along a transect across the Danube catchment (Germany, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, and Romania) and integrates modern soils with interglacial palaeosols, particularly units attributed to Marine Isotope Stage 5. Rather than assuming direct correspondence between modern and fossil soils, our study investigates the extent to which climate-sensitive relationships among soil properties are preserved through time and whether they can be transferred to palaeosol records. By integrating modern calibration datasets with spatially distributed LPS records, this study advances the quantitative interpretation of European loess–palaeosol systems and contributes to a more robust reconstruction of Pleistocene terrestrial environments.
Source: National Geoinformation Center
Language: English
Subfield: Soil Science
Domain: Life Sciences
SDGs: Climate action, Life on land
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204569559