This book unravels the deep-time story of the Baltic Sea's ancient shoreslandscapes shaped by the retreat of the last Ice Age and still visible today in raised beaches across Fennoscandia. Relict coastal plant species, surviving for millennia in habitats that mirror long-vanished shorelines, reveal how climate, soil and sunlight once allowed pioneer vegetation to flourish on emerging land. Using luminescence and radiocarbon dating, the authors determine the ages of prehistoric shorelines and even provide a new age estimate for a remarkable rock painting.

As land rose unevenly after the Ice Age, rivers shifted their courses; the dramatic outburst of the Kymi River through the First Salpausselkä ridge is traced and dated, along with the ensuing floods and ice-block events recorded in oral tradition and place names. Luminescence analyses also uncover evidence of ancient meltwater rivers flowing under the continental ice more than 60,000 years agoduring a milder interval that allowed mammoths to roam Fennoscandia before the ice returned. A vivid synthesis of geology, paleoecology and cultural history, this book brings to life the dynamic landscapes and climatic shifts that shaped Northern Europe's past.

The first determination of paleoshorelines with relict plants and dating of sands since the Middle Weichselian melting The first dating of the outbreak of the river Kymi through the First Salpausselkä ridge in SE Finland in the Holocene Proof that a glaciofluvial river about 60 000 years ago formed a north-south directed sand esker in SE Finland

Autorentext

Hannu Ahokas, born in 1947, is a plant geneticist, retired research specialty from the Agrifood Research Finland. He got a PhD degree from the University of Helsinki in 1984. His non-professional botanical and geological excursions and sample collecting for over 30 years led to the explorations dealt with in the book, with international collaboration. As an output in genetics, he detected in 1976 a cytoplasmic male sterility system in barley enabling mass hybridization, being commercialized to produce winter-barley hybrid-cultivars in Europe since 2002.

Dr. E.L. (Liz) Chamberlain is an Assistant Professor at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and a 2021 International Association of Sedimentologists awardee for outstanding work in marine sedimentology. She obtained her education at Tulane University and Louisiana State University, both situated in the beautiful Mississippi Delta, U.S. Her ongoing work explores geomorphology and human-landscape dynamics in coasts and deltas worldwide including those of Bangladesh, Peru, and the Netherlands.

Mark Bateman is a Professor in Palaeoenvironments at the University of Sheffield where he has conducted research for the last 30 years. He has a BSc in Geography from the University of London and a DPhil from the University of Sussex. He has over 200 publications in his research area of the use of sediment archives and luminescence dating for a better understanding past depositional processes and environmental changes. In 2018, he was awarded the Sorby medal by the Yorkshire Geological Society.

Klappentext

This book unravels the deep-time story of the Baltic Sea’s ancient shores—landscapes shaped by the retreat of the last Ice Age and still visible today in raised beaches across Fennoscandia. Relict coastal plant species, surviving for millennia in habitats that mirror long-vanished shorelines, reveal how climate, soil and sunlight once allowed pioneer vegetation to flourish on emerging land. Using luminescence and radiocarbon dating, the authors determine the ages of prehistoric shorelines and even provide a new age estimate for a remarkable rock painting.

As land rose unevenly after the Ice Age, rivers shifted their courses; the dramatic outburst of the Kymi River through the First Salpausselkä ridge is traced and dated, along with the ensuing floods and ice-block events recorded in oral tradition and place names. Luminescence analyses also uncover evidence of ancient meltwater rivers flowing under the continental ice more than 60,000 years ago—during a milder interval that allowed mammoths to roam Fennoscandia before the ice returned. A vivid synthesis of geology, paleoecology and cultural history, this book brings to life the dynamic landscapes and climatic shifts that shaped Northern Europe’s past.

Inhalt

Introduction.- Materials and Methods.- Results.- Discussion.- Conclusions.- References.- Index.