Session Details

Soil development and soil properties depend on the parent material and on the environmental conditions in which soils have formed. Therefore, paleosols or certain features in polygenetic soils may serve as valuable archives of past environments. It is however essential that these archives are appropriately interpreted in order to obtain reliable reconstructions of palaeo-environments. Therefore, this session focuses particularly on those characteristics of saprolite, paleosols and related archives, which may be used as suitable indicators for certain environmental conditions. Such indicators include specific characteristics in macro- and micromorphology, geochemistry, environmental magnetism, fossil assemblages, mineralogy and clay mineralogy and other parameters.A second focus of this session is the role of the archives described above for the present "critical zone" in a landscape. The critical zone is the heterogeneous earth’s skin of soil, sediments, and weathered rock, as well as the ecosystems they support. Understanding the evolution of the critical zone and its sensitivity to perturbations requires an understanding of its architecture and the processes that produce this architecture. Above all, Quaternary sediments and underlying saprolite control the structure of the critical zone, and therefore also the hydrological, geochemical, and biological functions of the landscape. This session will thus include contributions presenting indicators for various types of environmental conditions, as well as examples of palaeo-environmental reconstructions of particular regions based on such indicators. Papers bridging Quaternary processes and present critical zone functioning are welcome.