Pleistocene glacial history of the central and northern Black Forest, south-west Germany

Previous work points to the temporary existence of a plateau icefield and numerous cirque glaciers in the northern and central Black Forest, south-west Germany, but the chronology of glaciation remains poorly constrained. This study examines the glacial record at the transition between the central and northern Black Forest. Cirque metrics extraction for palaeoclimatic inferences was undertaken with the ACME2 (Automated Cirque Metrics Extraction) toolbox (Li et al. 2024) for the Esri ArcGIS Desktop software. The strong negative correlation between the longitude of the cirque centroid point and the minimum elevation of the cirques suggests the main supply of moist air masses from the west and orographic effects. Glacio-geomorphological mapping involved both the interpretation of derivatives of a LiDAR (light detection and ranging)-based high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) and extensive field surveys. The mapping of moraines largely confirmed earlier work. At the same time, however, revisiting the study region resulted in the identification of a large number of moraines that have not yet been described. Due to their freshness, the ice-marginal moraines in the study region are likely of Late Pleistocene age. To test this assumption, rock samples for beryllium-10 surface exposure dating have been collected from 70 large quartz-rich sandstone boulders on moraines.