LANDSCAPE EVOLUTION IN NORTHERN ADRIATIC REGIONS IN THE LAST INTERGLACIAL

The reconstruction of past climatic structure can be inferred by the study of high-resolution records, as natural archives of environmental history. The Last Interglacial (LIG) represents an essential interval marked by both temperature and sea level higher than today, under the effect of natural forcings. The N-Adriatic region represent a peculiar area for LIG reconstructions, thanks to the high sensitivity to marine fluctuations and the possibility to correlate terrestrial and marine deposits. Thanks to the abundance of long sedimentary records in the western side of the Adriatic Sea, during the last decades a comprehensive knowledge of environmental dynamics for the Late Pleistocene was thoroughly developed. By contrast, the eastern side lacks in long sedimentary deposits, resulting in an incomplete understanding environmental evolution. In this framework, the sequence MIR1 represents an exception: this core, drilled from the Mirna River mouth (Istria Peninsula), provided a multiproxy paleoenvironmental record encompassing the Termination II and the early LIG. The investigation carried out in this project on MIR1 disclosed vegetation dynamics, fine climate oscillations, and sea-level fluctuations, offering a comprehensive picture of environmental changes and timing of first marine ingression during the LIG. The detailed comparisons between western and eastern long sedimentary records developed in this work revealed the complementary landscape evolution along the N-Adriatic. Indeed, evidence for marine transgression culminating with the LIG high stand is testified by W-Adriatic records, whereas in the eastern Adriatic is present a contrasting narrative, as reported by MIR1 sequence that distinctly preserves evidence of the transgression occurred in the early LIG.