At present, major dust storms are occurring at mid-latitudes in the Middle East and Asia, as well as at low latitudes in Northern Africa and in Australia. Western Europe, though, does not experience such dramatic climate events, except for some African dust reaching it from the Sahara. This modern situation is of particular interest, in the context of future climate projections, since the present interglacial is usually interpreted, in this context, as an analog of the warm Eemian interval. European terrestrial records show, however, major dust events during the penultimate interglacial and early glacial. These events are easily observed in loess records by their whitish-color deposits, which lie above and below dark chernozem paleosols in Central European records of Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5 age.
We describe here the base of the Dolni Vestonice (DV) loess sequence, Czech Republic, as the reference of such records. The dust is deposited during intervals that are characterized by poor vegetation-manifested by high δ13C values and low magnetic susceptibility-while the fine sand and clay in the deposits shows grain sizes that are clearly different from the overlying pleniglacial loess deposits. Some of these dust events have been previously described as "Markers" or Marker Silts (MS) by one of us (G. Kukla), and are dated at about 111-109 ka and 93-92 ka, with a third and last one slightly visible at about 75-73 ka. Other events correspond to the loess material of Kukla's cycles, and are described as eolian silts (ES); they are observed in the same DV sequence and are dated at about 106-105 ka, 88-86 ka, and 78.5-77 ka. These dates are determined by considering the OSL ages with their errors measured on the studied sequence, and the comparison with Greenland ice-core and European speleothem chronologies.
Rousseau D.-D.,Ghil M.,Kukla G.,et al. Major dust events in Europe during marine isotope stage 5 (130–74 ka): A climatic interpretation of the "markers"[J]. Climate of the Past,2013-01-01,9(5)