Quaternary Environments

Over the last 2.6 million years the Earth has alternated between cold, glacial periods and warmer interglacials, driving profound changes in ice cover, permafrost distribution, sea level, vegetation and sedimentation. In mountain regions, ice sheets and valley glaciers sculpted bedrock into troughs, cirques and fjords, while in adjacent lowlands glacial advance and retreat produced tills, outwash gravels and complex terrace staircases. Beyond glaciated areas, periglacial processes—frost shattering, solifluction and ice-wedge growth—shaped slopes and mantled plateaux with blockfields. In intervening warm phases, rivers reworked glacial deposits into terraces and incised valleys, lakes trapped fine sediments and organic matter, and wind-blown loess formed thick blankets punctuated by soil development. These Quaternary environments record past climates, inform models of landscape evolution and underpin assessments of future change as permafrost thaws, sea levels rise and ecosystems respond to warming.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Continuous monitoring of permafrost boreholes worldwide has revealed a consistent warming trend across continuous, discontinuous and mountain permafrost zones since 2007, reflecting atmospheric amplification in the Arctic and the influence of winter snow cover on ground thermal regimes. In ice-rich landscapes of the High Arctic, satellite observations show that exceptionally warm summers have triggered thousands of retrogressive thaw slumps—rapid landslides caused by ground-ice melting—indicating that even minor temperature excursions can mobilise large volumes of sediment in continuous permafrost terrain. Remote sensing of major headwater basins on the Tibetan Plateau demonstrates a pronounced increase in erosion and sediment transport since the mid-1980s, with increasingly heterogeneous patterns of river deposition and erosion that threaten local ecosystems and infrastructure under ongoing warming.

Quaternary Environments publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in quaternary environments across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Permafrost: Ground (soil or rock) that remains at or below 0 °C for at least two consecutive years, storing large pools of organic carbon.

Active layer: The surface layer of soil above permafrost that thaws each summer and refreezes in winter.

Thermokarst slump: A rapid slope failure caused by melting ground ice in permafrost, leading to headwall collapse and sediment flow.

Ice stream: A fast-flowing corridor of ice within an ice sheet, often focusing erosion and sediment export to the margin.

Cryogenic cave carbonate: Calcite precipitated during slow freezing of mineralised water in caves, recording past permafrost thaw–freeze cycles.

Loess-palaeosol sequence: Alternating layers of wind-blown silt (loess) and soils (palaeosols) that document glacial-interglacial climate cycles.

References

1. Permafrost is warming at a global scale. Nature Communications (2019).
2. Extremes of summer climate trigger thousands of thermokarst landslides in a High Arctic environment. Nature Communications (2019).
3. Recent intensified erosion and massive sediment deposition in Tibetan Plateau rivers. Nature Communications (2024).
4. Large stocks of peatland carbon and nitrogen are vulnerable to permafrost thaw. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2020).
5. Global reorganization of deep-sea circulation and carbon storage after the last ice age. Science Advances (2022).
6. A huge flood in the Fraser River valley, British Columbia, near the Pleistocene Termination. Geomorphology (2021).