WAS THERE ANY INLAND ICE AT THE END OF THE CENOZOIC?

Abstract

The transforming composition of flora and fauna, the change in the structure of natural ecosystems on vast territories (especially of the northern continents) that occurred at the boundary between the Pleistocene and the Holocene require clarification as to their causes, which is impossible without adequate modelling of certain paleogeographical conditions. The natural conditions of that time are reconstructed most often on the basis of the conceptions on catastrophic climate changes and the disappearing giant glaciations, from the formation and decay of which, supposedly, the regressions and transgressions of the ocean depend on. However, since there is no strict synchronization between the processes that are supposedly severely dependent on climate change and, in particular, on the changes of glacials and interglacials, it is quite natural to doubt the very existence of the latter. This doubt is also very significantly enforced by the fact that the activity of glaciers taken as the initial cause of the formation of erratics and their striations is not actually such a cause. Moreover, a rapidly increasing wealth of factual data indicates that no giant glaciations were actually there.

Keywords

• Pleistocene
• Ice-age
• glacial covers
• glacial threshold
• exaration material
• ice sheet
• interglacial period