WOOD JAMS OR BEAVER DAMS? PLIOCENE LIFE, SEDIMENT AND LANDSCAPE INTERACTIONS IN THE CANADIAN HIGH ARCTIC

Author:

DAVIES NEIL S.1,GOSSE JOHN C.2,ROUILLARD ALEXANDRA34,RYBCZYNSKI NATALIA56,MENG JIN7,REYES ALBERTO V.8,KIGUKTAK JARLOO9

Affiliation:

1. 1 Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EQ, UK

2. 2 Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4R2, Canada

3. 3 Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, GLOBE Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

4. 4 Department of Geosciences, UiT—The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

5. 5 Department of Palaeobiology, Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa, Ontario K1P 6P4, Canada

6. 6 Department of Biology and Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6, Canada

7. 7 Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York, USA

8. 8 Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, T6G 2E3, Canada

9. 9 Grise Fiord, Nunavut, X0A 0J0, Canada

Abstract

ABSTRACT During the mid-Pliocene (Zanclean, ca. ∼ 3.9 Ma), parts of the Canadian High Arctic experienced mean annual temperatures that were 14–22°C warmer than today and supported diverse boreal-type forests. The landscapes of this vegetated polar region left behind a fragmented sedimentary record that crops out across several islands in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago as the Beaufort Formation and correlative strata. Paleoecological information from these strata provides a high-fidelity window onto Pliocene environments, and prominent fossil sites yield unparalleled insights into Cenozoic mammal evolution. Significantly, many of the strata reveal evidence for life-sediment interactions in a warm-climate Arctic, most notably in the form of extensive woody debris and phytoclast deposits. This paper presents original field data that refines the sedimentological context of plant debris accumulations from the anactualistic High Arctic forests, most notably at the ‘Fyles Leaf Beds' and ‘Beaver Pond' fossil-bearing sites in the ‘high terrace deposits' of central Ellesmere Island. The former is a remarkably well-preserved, leaf-rich deposit that is part of a complex of facies associations representing lacustrine, fluvio-deltaic and mire deposition above a paleotopographic unconformity. The latter yields tooth-marked woody debris within a peat layer that also contains a rich assemblage of vertebrate and plant fossils including abundant remains from the extinct beaver-group Dipoides. Here we present sedimentological data that provide circumstantial evidence that the woody debris deposit at Beaver Pond could record dam-building in the genus, by comparing the facies motif with new data from known Holocene beaver dam facies in England. Across the Pliocene of the High Arctic region, woody debris accumulations are shown to represent an array of biosedimentary deposits and landforms including mires, driftcretions, woody bedforms, and possible beaver dams, which help to contextualize mammal fossil sites, provide facies models for high-latitude forests, and reveal interactions between life and sedimentation in a vanished world that may be an analogue to that of the near-future.

Publisher

Society for Sedimentary Geology

Subject

Paleontology,Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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