Helena Alexanderson

Fine-grained windblown deposits (loess) in which fossil soils (palaeosols) are preserved are excellent records of past climate. However, so far paleoclimate reconstruction studies conducted on such loess-palaeosol sequences (LPS) in SE Europe were focused on the climate changes of the last one or two glacial-interglacial cycles, while almost no attention has been directed to the climate of the current interglacial, the Holocene. This is probably since, according to ice core and marine isotope records, the Holocene is considered a climatically stable period and because LPS with well-preserved Holocene loess have been lacking, until now. Three newly discovered loess-palaeosol sequences in the Eastern Carpathian and Wallachian Basin display fully preserved Holocene loess and thus have the potential to reveal new and detailed information about the Holocene climate. Here, we present initial results of two of these LPS: Kisiljevo (44°44′0’’ N and 21°25′0’’ E) in north-eastern Serbia (Carpathian Basin) and Velika Vrbica (44°35’1.70’’N, 22°43’15.97’’E) in eastern Serbia (Wallachian Basin). For both sequences, detailed OSL chronologies using 63-90 µm quartz have been constructed. The calculated OSL ages were modelled using the r.bacon software (Blaauw & Christen, 2011) after which dust accumulation rates (MAR) for the last ~30 ka were calculated. The initial results at Kisiljevo reveal a considerable loess accumulation during the Holocene (~120 cm). The highest MARs were observed between 10 and 12 ka (~10 000-8 000 BC) with a mean value of 148 g m² a^-1. At the Velika Vrbica LPS, a similar trend is evident. The average calculated MARs during the early Holocene (8 – 11.7 ka) were 189 g m² a^-1, showing a decreasing trend towards the later part of this period (8 – 3.1 ka) with average values reaching 132.1 g m^-2 a^-1. Interestingly, at this site, the mean MARs during marine isotope stage 1 (MIS) were higher than during the cold, stadial MIS 2, where the recorded values averaged 177 g m^-2 a^-1. These initial results indicate that the Holocene climate in this region was more variable than what the generally accepted models suggest.