Late Quaternary Climate Change in the Eastern Interior of Alaska: A Multidisciplinary Pilot Study

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This award supports a multidisciplinary study of three lakes in eastern interior Alaska to investigate how lake-levels, vegetation, and sedimentary processes are related to climate change. The study will focus on the late Wisconsin and early Holocene (c.a. 14,000 to 6000 years B.P.), a period of marked and relatively rapid climatic change. The lakes are expected to be sensitive to climatic fluctuations and have sedimentation rates rapid enough to record high-frequency events. This work has three components: 1. assessment of the detail with which a lake-level record can be constructed; 2. comparison of high resolution records of vegetation change from fossil pollen with the lake-level record to examine how lakes and vegetation differ in their response to climate change; 3. the construction of basic hydrologic budgets for each lake and their use to estimate past values of important parameters of the hydrologic system, in particular precipitation. This project represents an element of the PALE project (Paleoclimates of Arctic Lakes and Estuaries).