Late Quaternary Climate and Vegetation History of the Alaskan North Slope: Calibration of Modern Data

Linda B. Brubaker    lbru@u.washington.edu (Principal Investigator current)
Patricia M. Anderson (Co-Principal Investigator current)
                
Abstract    

     Determining possible responses of Arctic ecosystems to global warming
     requires an understanding of both the past and present tundra communities. 
     Although the distribution and composition of modern North American tundra
     communities are relatively well documented, the late-Quaternary history of
     their development remains poorly known.  This award supports an examination of
     the paleovegetation and paleoclimate of far northern Alaska over the last
     18,000 years as a means of improving our knowledge of terrestrial-climate
     system interactions in Low Arctic settings.  This research, as part of the PALE
     initiative, will analyze lake sediments from a suite of sites located in 4
     tundra types of the Alaska North Slope.  This work will concentrate on
     calibrating modern pollen, moss spores, and lignin compounds with surrounding
     vegetation and climatic parameters to assess their ability to accurately
     reconstruct past environments and will apply these calibrations to a set of
     fossil records chosen during the modern sampling.  The proposed research
     addresses the goals of PALE by describing the late-Quaternary history of a
     poorly know Low Arctic region, by calibrating paleoenvironmental indicators,
     and by increasing the resolution of lake records for defining variations within
     tundra environments.