The Fennoscandia Ice Sheets Left a Stratigraphic Record That Is Still Being Decoded Today.

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The effort to establish a precise stratigraphy for the Quaternary - the geological period covering the last 2.6 million years and all of its ice ages, warm periods, and catastrophic transitions - began in earnest in the 1970s and has been ongoing ever since. The process is constant - being refined, improved, and modified as new data comes in and new correlations are identified. The goal is a reliable chronology that ties together the changes in climate, flora, fauna, and landscape across the full span of the Quaternary into a coherent and precisely dated sequence.

One of the earliest major efforts toward that end focused on the Fennoscandian ice sheet region - a logical starting point given the dramatic and well preserved record of glacial advance and retreat visible in the stratigraphy of northern Europe. The great variations in climate that characterize the Quaternary are not simply recorded in historical documents or ice cores. They leave physical imprints in the geological record - changes in the composition of sediment layers, shifts in the pollen and fossil record, alterations in the landscape itself that can be read by researchers trained to interpret them. The stratigraphy is the archive. Every layer is a page. And the effort to read that archive with sufficient precision to reconstruct what actually happened - and when - is a scientific project that Randall argues is far from complete.