Palaeoecological investigations and 230 Th/U dating of Eemian interglacial peat sequence of Banzin (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, NE-Germany)

A novel occurrence of an Eemian interglacial peat was identified in 2011 in a short-lived outcrop of the NEL-pipeline trench, near the village of Banzin, Germany. The profiles are situated in a shallow kettle hole within the undulated landscape of the Saalian glaciation. The distribution of dominantly till lithofacies in the Banzin area confirms the regional trend of Saalian tills with a locally higher abundance of Cretaceous clasts. In the Banzin kettle, at a depth of 2.2 m, lies a 0.5-m thick, strongly compressed Eemian peat layer. The buried Eemian peat layer is deformed by ice-wedge pseudo-morphological and mega crack structures, indicating a strong periglacial influence during Weichselian stadial phases. The post-Eemian sequence is subdivided into three units, beginning with a mixture of aeolian and gelifluction deposits, which are also modified by cryostructures. The top of the Banzin sequence is covered by a 0.5-m thick colluvisol layer of redeposited humic loam from the Late Weichselian/Holocene. The uppermost unit suggests that solifluction processes occurred in the last few hundred years, likely driven by intensive anthropogenic influence.