About 1.6 million square kilometres of subaerial shelf land
existed between the modern coast and the sea level lowstand in
the region of the modern Laptev, East Siberian and Chuchki Seas
during the Last Glacial Maximum. We consider this Great Arctic
Plain (GAP) as the northern part of the Late Pleistocene
Beringia between Siberia and Alaska. Permafrost is the main
feature that characterized this landscape. This shelf landscape
was neither glaciated during the Late Pleistocene nor throughout
the Late Saalian glacial periods. Most parts of the extensive
area were flooded in a relatively short time span of 7 ky during
the Early-Middle Holocene. How was this lost world originally
characterized and how did it react on the Late Quaternary
climate variations? Some answers were found in permafrost
sequences on the coastal plains around the Laptev Sea, which
represent the frozen remnants of the GAP. Since 1998 joint
Russian-German expeditions studied ice-rich permafrost deposits
exposed in numerous bluffs along the co