Würm glaciation

The Würm glaciation (German: Würm-Kaltzeit or Würm-Glazial or Würm stage, colloquially often also Würmeiszeit oder Würmzeit; c.f. ice age), in the literature usually just referred to as the Würm, often spelt "Wurm", is the name given to the last glacial period in the Alpine region. It is the youngest of the major glaciations of the region that extended beyond the Alps themselves. It is, like most of the other ice ages of the epoch, named after a river, the Würm in Bavaria, a tributary of the Amper. The Würm ice age can be dated to the time about 115,000 to 11,700 years ago, the sources differing depending on whether the long transition phases between the glacials and interglacials (warmer periods) are allocated to one or other of these periods. The average annual temperatures during the Würm ice age in the Alpine Foreland were below −3 °C (today +7 °C). This has been determined from changes in the vegetation (pollen analysis) as well as differences in the facies.

The corresponding ice age of North and Central Europe is known as the Weichselian glaciation. Despite the global changes in climate that were responsible for the major glaciations cycles, the dating of the Alpine ice sheet advances does not correlate automatically with the farthest extent of the Scandinavian ice sheet. In North America the corresponding "last ice age" is called the Wisconsin glaciation.

In the Gelasian, i.e. at the beginning of the Quaternary period around 2.6 million years ago, an ice age began in the northern hemisphere which continues today. Characteristic of such ice ages is the glaciation of the polar caps. After the Gelasian followed the Early, Middle and Late Pleistocene with a succession of several warm and cold periods. The latter are often called "ice ages" or "glacials", the former term often being confused with the overarching ice age period. The warm periods are called "interglacials". Glaciers repeatedly advanced from the Alps to the northern molasse foreland and left moraines and meltwater deposits behind that are up to several hundred metres thick. Today, the Pleistocene epoch in the Alps is divided into several phases: the Biber, Danube, Günzburg, Haslach, Mindel, Riss and Würm glaciations. The greatest ice advance into the Alpine Foreland took place during the Riss glaciation (c.f the Saale glaciation in northern Europe). The most recent foreland glaciation, the Würm, did not have such an extensive and solid glacial front. Nevertheless, its terminal moraines, which indicate the perimeter of the ice sheet, extend as a single tongue well into the foreland. Whilst they were hemmed in by the high mountainsides of the Alps, once these rivers of ice entered the foreland they often combined to form huge glaciers.

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