High latitude Eurasian paleoenvironments: introduction and synthesis

This special issue developed partly from the open PAGES conference held in Moscow in May 2002. The dominant theme of the present collection of articles is the Late Pleistocene and Holocene paleoenvironmental history of Northern Eurasia-from the White to the Black Sea and from the Estonia to the Kurile Islands. we briefly summarize the available paleorecords from the FSU territory covering the last 1500 years. A number of records allow one to distinguish the climatic pattern of the 9th–13th centuries from earlier and later colder conditions in the Kola peninsula, Urals, Taymir, Russian Plain, Caucasus and East Siberia. The 10th–12th centuries were also slightly warmer in the Far East (Kurile Islands). The warming of the 14th century in several regions, including the Russian plain, Altai and Central Asia, was at least as intense as the earlier one at ca. 1 kyr before present or even warmer. The available data for this time period remain controversial in the arid area of Central Asia. Records from the Caspian Sea area suggest moderate temperature and relatively high humidity in the first half of the millenium, whereas in the Tien Shan mountains, the beginning of the millenium seems to have been warm and dry. Various line of evidence suggest a climatic deterioration in the second half of the last millenium throughout the FSU, including the European part, Siberia, the Caucasus,the mountains of the Central Asia, the Far East and the Arctic archipelagoes.