Book Description
The second edition of this authoritative introduction to the global environmental fluctuations of the Quaternary period has been thoroughly revised and updated, and now includes two new chapters: one on Quaternary soils and sediments, and one on the Milankovitch theory and its implications for Quaternary climatic oscillations. The book draws on examples from every continent, including Antarctica, and features a superb range of maps and illustrations. The time span covered includes relevant events during the Tertiary which set the stage for the Quaternary glaciations and associated changes in climate, vegetation, and prehistoric human development. Focusing on the interactions between geological, biological and hydrological processes, the book explores the effects of accelerating human impact on the environment and considers how far evidence from the Quaternary may be useful in predicting future environmental change. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Quaternary Environments
This book is very valuable for getting information about Quaternary environmental changes of our earth. It includes wide variety of methods of reconstructing Pleistocene environments and dating tools. General description is very neat and suitable for easy reading

quaternary
this book that concerns with quaternary environments, is one of the best reviewed one. However, if it is comperated with "reconstructing quaternary environments" by walker and lowe, it is lack of some metods relating palaeogeographical reconstructing. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Arid Environments, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Southern South America (SSA) has today a high diversity of climates, environments, biomes, and biotas, as a result of the complex interaction through time of plants and animals with the geological forces (e.g. plate tectonics, sea-level changes, glaciations) that modulated the geography of the continent. Arid biomes are well represented in SSA today, but were arid biomes similarly important in the geologic past? How long in time can be found major arid biomes in SSA? With the aim of replaying these questions, in this paper we summarized the paleoenvironmental changes of SSA through Cenozoic, emphasizing the relationships between biomes and the geological forces that, through different climatic-environmental factors, have driven its evolution. We define SSA the south of the 15^oS area. We prefer this geographical delimitation because with it we can see and follow the history of the biogeographic (historic and ecologic) relationships of Patagonian biota with the rest of the South American biota. Additionally, with this delimitation we possess the most complete Cenozoic South American land-mammal fossil record. We use biomes because biomes are taxon-free analytical units, and their pattern of change can be traced through time independently of the taxa present at different geological periods. Data on plate tectonics, volcanism, sea-level changes, marine paleotemperatures, and glaciations were taken from literature. To analyse the pattern of change of southern South American climates and environments through the Cenozoic, we used the fossil record of land-mammals as information source. When available, the record of vascular plants were used to contrast the inferences derived from land-mammals. Finally, we used standard geologic divisions (i.e. Epochs) as chronological units. The main conclusion of this paper is that from Early Paleocene to Late Pleistocene, southern South American climatic conditions changed from warm, wet, and non-seasonal, to colder, dryer, and seasonal. Concomitantly, biomes changed from tropical forest to steppes, across a sequence constituted by subtropical forests, woodland savanna, park-savanna, and grassland savanna. During the Quaternary, and as a consequence of glacial cycles, cold and dry conditions were interrupted by warmer and wet periods. Accordingly, several pulses of expansion and retraction of steppes (and, concomitantly, advances and retreats of the northern tropical forests) are recorded. This cyclic pattern of changes produced the provincialism that has characterized the South American biota from Early Pleistocene to the present. the present. ... Read more

Book Description
This book describes the progress that has been made in the study of the process of ice rafting. It includes chapters on the concept of ice rafting and ice rafting and climate change. The main focus of the book is the reconstruction of past ice drift directions and their significance for an understanding of the global oceanic and atmospheric circulation. ... Read more