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

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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.