The ice-free and forest dominated landscape changed progressively to periglacial conditions from the Eocene to the Oligocene, which is called the greenhouse-icehouse transition, being considered as the largest glaciation of the last 65 Ma. The main objective of this project is to reconstruct the environment from paleosols of the Maritime Antarctica during the Eocene-Oligocene transition. The specific objectives are: to estimate the intensity of paleoweathering, to identify the main pedogenic processes, to assess the mean annual paleotemperature (MAPT) and mean annual paleoprecipitation (MAPP) from soil-geochemical data and stable isotopes, to estimate the atmospheric CO2 concentration during the period of soil formation and to identify the paleovegetation and paleo-soilhydrological conditions.
This data publication contains the data sets of a study aiming to reconstruct environmental conditions during the Holocene in the upper part of the Kali Gandaki valley, Nepal. The data are for samples taken from paleosol sections in the Upper Mustang region (Menges et al. 2019). On these samples we measured the grain size distribution to gain information about the depositional processes, pollen data to reconstruct past vegetation, 14C isotopes in the humin fraction of organic matter for soil formation ages, and hydrogen isotopic composition on n-alkanes to reconstruct past hydrological conditions. This is complemented with optically stimulated luminescence data for additional depositional age information, surface water samples and modern soil samples to constrain modern hydrological conditions, and sediment concentration data to gain insights into erosion processes. The data was generated between 2013-02 and 2018-12. The data files are provided in Excel and tab-delimited text versions.