Exploring the potential of a new North American Plio-Pleistocene paleoclimate record from a drillcore from Paleo-Lake Idaho

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This is a follow-up proposal of a previously granted interdisciplinary project that focused on exploring the paleoclimate potential of the ICDP-derived MHAFB11 core, a high-quality sediment core from Paleolake Idaho that may develop into a key archive for late Pliocene to early Pleistocene climate and ecosystem change in the mid-latitudes of North America. Whereas for the first project phase one proposal consisting of three proposal components had been submitted, we here submit the continuation requests as two stand-alone, but still thematically related proposals. The sub-projects that the PIs of the present proposal have been responsible for during the first project phase have yielded a crucial paleomagnetic age marker (i.e., the position of the Gauss/Matuyama reversal) and a first, low-resolution pollen record across the Pliocene/Pleistocene transition interval. The here proposed follow-up project for the final twelve project months aims (i) to establish a palynological dataset with a mean resolution of 1.5 m across the 440–730 m study interval of the MHAFB11 core, which to our knowledge will be the first of its kind for North America, and (ii) to generate pollen-based reconstructions of vegetation and climate dynamics. Based on the resulting datasets, the project will develop conceptual paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic models for the Plio¬cene/Pleistocene transition in the mid-latitudes of western North America. It will critically assess existing scenarios for the climatic processes across the Plio¬ce-ne/Pleistocene transition. In particular, its geographical position within western North America will make it possible to test the hypothesis that enhanced humidity from the Pacific may have provided water vapour to northern North America, thereby allowing the initiation of Nor¬thern Hemisphere glaciation.