PaleoEurope-DEM v1.0: A distributed pipeline for continental-scale paleo-landscape reconstruction from FABDEM-GEBCO fusion and glacial isostatic adjustment

Pavel Novikau 

Reconstructing paleo-landscapes at high spatial resolution is essential for understanding Quaternary environmental change, yet no open-source, reproducible pipeline currently exists for fusing modern elevation data with glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) models at continental scale. We present PaleoEurope-DEM v1.0, a distributed processing pipeline that produces continuous topo-bathymetric digital elevation models (DEMs) for any epoch in the interval 0–26 ka BP at approximately 30 m horizontal resolution across Europe. The pipeline ingests the forest- and building-removed FABDEM (1") for land and GEBCO 2024 (15") for bathymetry, evaluates an optional EGM2008-based geoid offset, ultimately rejected based on validation, and merges the two grids via a signed-distance alpha-blending algorithm that produces seamless coastal transitions. Glacial isostatic adjustment is applied using the ICE-6G (VM5a) bedrock orography field through a delta method that preserves the full 30 m detail of the modern surface. A novel Envelope Method blends ICE-7G ice thickness with the deformed bedrock to create physically plausible ice-sheet surfaces that transition smoothly from terrain-following margins to model-controlled domes. Processing is distributed across a two-node workstation cluster using Celery task queues and Docker containers, enabling parallel generation of 6,302 one-degree tiles per epoch. We validate the pipeline output against independent paleocoastline reconstructions and known paleogeographic benchmarks including the emergence of the Dogger Bank and Holocene inundation of the English Channel. Quantitative coastline comparison yields mean nearest-neighbour offsets of 30.7 km at 8 ka, 62.9 km at 12 ka, and 89.3 km at 21 ka. The complete source code is released under an MIT license. PaleoEurope-DEM v1.0 provides the geoscience community with a reproducible, extensible framework for generating high-resolution paleo-landscape reconstructions suitable for hydrological modeling, archaeological analysis, and paleoclimate downscaling.