Quaternary Periodicities of Drought in Greece

The Greek landscape offers a large variety of plateau’s, lake (subsidence) basins and coastal plains which have been shaped in the course of the Quaternary i.e. the timespan of roughly the last 3 Ma. million years. It is the kind of landscape which Budel(1982) described as the “Etesian Region of the Subtropical Zone of Mixed Relief Development”. “Etesian” (from the Greek etos = year) points at the steady regularly reappearing south-bound drift of the lower atmosphere over the eastern mediterranean and adjacent lands, in the summer from mid-May through mid-September.