Paleolandscapes of the Southern North Sea: Rhine-Thames land, glaciation foreland, stratigraphic correlation heart land.

The southern North Sea is surrounded by European countries of diverse Quaternary geology and equally diverse traditions in mapping and studying it. The area tends to inundate during interglacials and to fall dry for good parts of glacial periods. In the latter periods the area collects terrestrial record in valleys (fluvial), in interfluve area (periglacial) and during briefer intervals also ice-sheet marginal (morainic and proglacial). Shelf sea transgressions occur along paths inherited from the terrestrial terrain. Fluvial and subglacial activity from younger glacials dissects and reworks older record.

The palaeontological record (reworked Early Pleistocene, in place from younger times) and archaeological record (Middle Pleistocene; Late Pleistocene; Early Holocene) of the area are rather rich. The taphonomy of offshore bone and tool find sites was misty for a long time. Steps of offshore geological data collection, working up proxy-records from core material, spatially continuous mapping of the Quaternary geology on land and below sea, and lastly palaeogeographical scenario mapping for time slices of the Pleistocene – has improved this. The mapping is good enough today to provide surrogate taphonomic context.

Positioned in the middle, the North Sea area holds great promise for constructing and validating the stratigraphic correlations that are used to upscale regional mapping and dating to unified continental coverage. Similar to supplying taphonomic information on stray finds, also when building and ranking arguments for stratigraphic correlations, the palaeogeographical scenarios – which force the researcher to make thoughts on original distribution areas of paleoenvironments explicit (and available for peer judgement) – are an important tool for assessing the strength and weaknesses of advocated stratigraphic ties.