Photograph of the coring in September 2024, with Jacques-Louis de Beaulieu and Hervé Richard (ChronoEnvironnement)
Nestling in the heart of the Burgundy-Franche-Comté nature reserves, the Grande Pile is an exceptional peat bog offering an invaluable continuous palaeoecological archive covering the last 130,000 years. Following the pioneering study by Geneviève M. Woillard in the late 1970s, the work of Jacques-Louis de Beaulieu and Maurice Reille (researchers at IMEP, the forerunner of IMBE) has revolutionised our understanding of Quaternary climate cycles in Europe (Beaulieu and Reille, 1992).
These palynologists have thus helped to establish the Grande Pile as a world reference site for palaeoecology and climate reconstruction, providing us with information on the migrations and dynamics of forests in response to past climate change. Today, the IMBE and ChronoEnvironment Together, they are reopening this library, rich in a turbulent environmental past.
Following a core sample taken in September 2024 (allowing 15 m of sediment to be sampled), the time has now come for analysis, this time using very high temporal resolution (with sampling steps of 5 mm for specific climatic episodes) and a highly multidisciplinary approach (pollen, charcoal, DNA, thecamoebiens, diatoms, geochemistry, etc.).
Stay tuned!
