New European Loess Map

Leipzig. A new map showing the distribution of loess sediments in Europe has been published for the first time in 75 years, in digital format. With this map, Dagmar Haase, a geographer at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), has completed the work of various researchers who had begun as far back as the 1970s and 80s to revise the last comprehensive inventory produced by Rudolf Grahmann, which appeared in Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde in Leipzig in 1932. Haase and her colleagues have produced the new map with a scale of 1:2,500,000 with the help of modern digital information systems.

In total, loess soils cover around one fifth of Europe: especially in the Eastern European lowlands, in a belt north of the low mountain range, in the foothills of the Alps and the Danube basin and in various other river basins. The publication of the map in Quaternary Science Reviews marks the completion of a project on which geographers and soil scientists have been working for decades.

Public release date: 15-Nov-2007