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NUMBER 89 143
FIGURE 2.—Area of sympatry of seabirds from Bacon Hole, Great Britain (Calonectris diomedea, Alca torda).
(•=fossil site.)
THE EARLY WEICHSELIAN PLENIGLACIAL.—This fairly short
stadial (ca. 75-60 Ka BP) was quite cold, and the Scandinavian
icecap expanded as far as eastern Denmark and northern Poland.
The only fauna that might be assigned to this interval is
layer K at Gorham's Cave (Gibraltar), which has been dated to
"Wurm I" (Hernandez Carrasquilla, 1993). This is a rather
"cold" fauna {Phalacrocorax aristotelis, Alle alle, Pinguinus
impennis) (Figure 3), and the presence of at least Alle alle
would certainly seem to indicate pleniglacial conditions, al­
though layer K also has been dated (Vega Toscano, 1990) to
the somewhat milder mid-Weichselian (ca. 45 Ka BP).
THE MID-WEICHSELIAN INTERSTADIAL COMPLEX.—This
spans the period ca. 65-25 Ka BP, during which the climate
was strongly cyclic. In very general terms, it consisted of two
milder interstadials, ca. 60 Ka BP and ca. 30 Ka BP, separated
by a colder stadial. For most of this interval, southern Scandinavia
and at least parts of the Norwegian coast were ice-free.
The most interesting site from this interval is Skjonghelleren
(layer G) in Norway, dated to the Alesund interstadial