ABSTRACT
New dating techniques and more precise interpretations of the best records of vegetation and landform history provided by continental, lacustrine and near-shore sedimentary deposits have demonstrated the remarkable series of changes affecting the tropics in the Quaternary. An increasingly consistent, global picture of expanding and contracting rainforest and desert areas, of changing lake and sea levels, and of metamorphosing rivers has emerged, particularly for the last glacial/interglacial cycle. Although the detailed evidence comes from scarce, widely separated sites with long, continuous depositional sequences, such as Lynch’s Crater (Fig. 2.5), new remote-sensing technology, including LANDSAT imagery, sideways-looking airborne radar (SLAR) (Tricart 1974a), METEOSAT (Mainguet et al. 1980, Mainguet 1983) and combinations of data from various sources (Haxby et al. 1983) have facilitated regional reconstructions of past environmental conditions. The variety, quality and growing quantity of evidence for Quaternary climatic change is well summarised by Williams in Chapter 11 for Africa, Asia and Australia, while in Chapter 10 Tricart relates his largely personal story of the unravelling of the Quaternary of tropical South America.
