Danube Valley - The Nexus between East and West: A Geoscience Approach

<p>The most important river of the European Union, the Danube, large sediment and nutrient influxes in the last millennium ultimately led to drastic morphological and ecological changes at the oceanic end of this system, the Black Sea. We suggested that these transformations are the result of the Ottoman Empire expansion into the Balkans between 1350 and 1450 A.D. Adoption of the Islamic cultural package in the region may have led to rapid deforestation of highlands for sheep farming at the expense of traditional small-scale cattle and pig farming. Alternative theories to explain this cascade of system-scale sedimentary changes are either agricultural - (a) the adoption of corn as the main staple from the Columbian exchange after 1500 AD, or climatic - (b) climate cooling during the Little Ice Age (LIA) after 1400 AD. In the case of Danube, such interdependencies between Nature and Culture are many. Searching for historical lessons, we review them starting from <em>Homo sapiens&#8217;</em> and Neolithic agriculture expansions into Europe, ancient Greek and Roman engineering interventions long the river, the <em>avant-la-lettre</em> ecological management of the lower floodplain under Grigore Antipa, the catastrophic communist abuse of the combined natural-human system and explore their expression in the sedimentary architecture of the floodplain.</p>