Making a Long Continental Pollen Record, a Fabulous and Bizarre Enterprise: A 50-year Retrospective

Abstract

Long continental pollen records (LCPRs) form a remarkable aspect of palynological research. They are rare, mostly collected in multiple coring sessions, due to time constraints they often do not reach the sample resolution anticipated, train the international audience to accept regularly improved age models, and show exciting histories of how ecosystems responded to Quaternary ice-age cycles. LCPRs also offer marine, and icecore studies a framework to explore how marine, ice and land ecosystems are responding to climate change in a mutual interaction. The decennia needed to complete such record is bizarre resulting in pollen records do not match in time with fast results from proxies with automatized procedures. Unfortunately, the development of long pollen records is in practice restricted to palynologists with a long research horizon. New applications of LCPRs have been explored in mountain areas. Sample-resolution steps through the last million years show how the surface of north Andean high mountain vegetation (p aramo) dramatically and repeatedly changed in surface, hinting at evolutionary processes.