Waalian interglacial

The Waalian interglacial (German: Waal-Warmzeit or Waal-Interglazial) (Zagwijn, 1960) was an interglacial in northern Europe that lasted from about 1.45 million to 1.20 million years ago. It thus lies entirely within the Old Pleistocene and is thus part of the Cenozoic. Its name is derived from a major branch of the Rhine delta, the Waal. The Waal warm period could correspond temporally to the Danube-Gunz interglacial of the northern Alpine Foreland.

The warm period lies wholly within the Matuyama epoch, in which the earth's magnetic field, with a few exceptions, had a different polarity from that today: the magnetic north pole (actually corresponding to the magnetic south) lay near the geographic south pole.

Literature

• Thomas Litt; Karl-Ernst Behre; Klaus-Dieter Meyer; Hans-Jürgen Stephan; Stefan Wansa (2007), T. Litt im Auftrag der Deutschen Stratigraphischen Kommission, ed., "Stratigraphische Begriffe für das Quartär des norddeutschen Vereisungsgebietes" (in German), Stratigraphie von Deutschland - Quartär. Special issue. Eiszeitalter und Gegenwart/Quaternary Science Journal (Stuttgart: E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung (Nägele und Obermiller)) 56, No. 1/2: pp. 7-65, doi:10.3285/eg.56.1-2.02, ISSN 0424-7116, http://quaternary-science.publiss.net/issues/54/articles/763 
• Zagwijn, W.H., 1960. Aspects of the Pliocene and Early Pleistocene vegetation in the Netherlands. Mededelingen Geologische Stichting, Serie C-III-l, 5: 178 pp.