Palaeoenvironmental history of the last six centuries in the Nettilling Lake area (Baffin Island, Canada): A multi-proxy analysis

Author:

Beaudoin Anne1,Pienitz Reinhard12,Francus Pierre23,Zdanowicz Christian4,St-Onge Guillaume5

Affiliation:

1. Laboratoire de paléoécologie aquatique (LPA), Département de Géographie and Centre d’études nordiques (CEN), Université Laval, Canada

2. Centre Eau Terre Environnement (ETE), Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), Canada

3. Centre d’études nordiques (CEN), Université Laval, Canada

4. Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Sweden

5. Institut des sciences de la mer de Rimouski (ISMER), Canada Research Chair in Marine Geology, Université du Québec à Rimouski and GEOTOP Canada

Abstract

The Baffin Island region in the eastern Canadian Arctic has recently experienced a rapid warming, possibly unprecedented in millennia. To investigate the response of freshwater environments to this warming and place it in a secular perspective, we analyzed a 90-cm-long sediment core from Nettilling Lake, the largest lake of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The core was taken from a part of the lake basin that receives meltwater and sediment inputs from the nearby Penny Ice Cap. The core time scale, established using 137Cs and palaeomagnetic techniques, spans an estimated 600 years. A multi-proxy approach was used to document changes in the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the sediments. We found evidence for a relatively warm period (mid/late 15th century to mid/late 16th century) during the early part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ (LIA), characterized by high sedimentation rates and laminations. This was followed by colder, drier, and windier conditions corresponding to the coldest phase of LIA and coinciding with the latest and most extensive period of regional ice cap expansion (early 16th to late 19th centuries). A rapid warming occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. Variations in titanium (Ti) content in the core, a proxy for detrital sediment inputs, showed good agreement with reconstructed secular variations in summer melt rates on Penny Ice Cap between the mid-14th century and the present-day, providing supporting evidence for a climatic–hydrological connection between the ice cap and Nettilling Lake.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Paleontology,Earth-Surface Processes,Ecology,Archeology,Global and Planetary Change

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