Reconstruction of the Late Pleistocene and Holocene environmental history of East and Northeast Greenland by a multidisciplinary study of lake sediments

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The planned project is part of an international cooperation with the Alfred Wegener Institute (Germany), the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS, Denmark), the University Lund (Sweden), and the University Utrecht (The Netherlands). The international project is targeted on a detailed reconstruction of the Late Quaternary glacial history and postglacial climatic and environmental changes in East and Northeast Greenland. For this purpose, sample material was collected on an expedition in 2003 from lakes, soils, and geomorphological units on two islands at the outer coast, which according to former studies have partly been ice free during the Last Glacial Maximum. The contribution of the University Leipzig to the project focuses on chronological, sedimentological, and biogeochemical studies of the recovered lake sediment sequences, and, for the first time in East Greenland, on fossil chironomid successions in these deposits. A comparison of the deduced climatic and environmental history with that from other coastal ice-free regions of Greenland will contribute to a better understanding of regional peculiarities in ice movements, relative sea-level changes, and climate developments, and of the related reasons, such as changes in the atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns.