Pilot study for the geochemical characterisation of loess-palaeosoil sequences: the project S³

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Loess-palaeosoil sequences (LPSS) are unique natural archives of climatic conditions in Europe. Their sedimentary records provide information about wind conditions and processes of soil formation amongst others. However, until today and different to lacustrine and marine sedimentary records high-resolution geochemical analyses of LPSS have rarely been published. For this study (the project S³) dried and ground samples from three different European LPSS (Schwalbenberg II at the Middle-Rhine valley in Germany, Süttö at the river Danube in Hungary, Susak located in the northern Adriatic Sea in Croatia) will be analysed for their elemental composition with the ITRAX XRF core-scanner. To increase the explanatory power of elemental ratios, additional CNS analyses will be provided and other published data will be consulted. It is the aim of this pilot study to compare conventionally obtained data with geochemical information provided by the XRF core-scanner and to investigate whether interpretations of elemental ratios known from marine and lacustrine sediments can be transferred to aeolian deposits. This completely new methodological approach applied to the interpretation of LPSS could lead to a follow-up project focussing on using the entire potential of XRF core-scanning for the analysis of continuous sediment cores from loess dominated landscapes. This non-destructive method would have a high spatial resolution of up to 200 µm. Thus, the temporal resolution of information from LPSS will be increased by several orders of magnitude, which makes available high-resolution terrestrial climatic and environmental parameters for the Middle- and Late-Pleistocene.