Abstract
Three types of pollen assemblages (shrub-dominated, mixed herb- and shrub-dominated, and herb-dominated) characterize the ~ 300,000 year palynological record from El’gygytgyn Lake. Despite major changes in global climatic forcings, all pollen spectra, with a few isolated exceptions, have strong to possible analogs in the modern plant communities of Northeast Siberia and Alaska. Paleoclimatic reconstructions based on squared chord-distance analog analyses indicate two periods (~8600–10,700 14C year B.P. and OIS 5e) when summers were perhaps ~2 to 4°C warmer than modern. January temperatures were also warmer than present, and both July and January were wetter than today. Palynological data remain inconclusive as to the establishment of forests near El’gygytgyn Lake at these times. The wettest Julys occurred during OIS 5 d. July temperatures were near modern, and Januarys were colder and drier than now. January temperatures, even into the Middle Pleistocene, generally show little variability, suggesting that the suppression of arboreal taxa during glaciations was likely caused by cool summers with low effective moisture and not by frigid winters. Because age schemes that correlate magnetic susceptibility to variations in summer insolation or ∂18O have cool plant taxa persisting in warm times (and vice versa), we propose an alternative age model based on the palynological data.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants from the Russian Foundation for Fundamental Research (03-05-64294 and 06-05-64129 to AVL), Far East Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences (05-III-B-09-009 to AVL) and the National Science Foundation (ATM 00-117406 to PMA; ATM 96-15768 and ATM 99-05813 to Julie Brigham-Grette). We thank Mathieu Duvall for his help in the analog analyses and Patrick Bartlein for calculating climate assignments for the modern pollen samples. We also thank three unnamed reviewers whose comments were very helpful in improving the manuscript. This is PARCS Publication Number 234.
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This is the first in a series of eleven papers published in this special issue dedicated to initial studies of El’gygytgyn Crater Lake and its catchment in NE Russia. Julie Brigham-Grette, Martin Melles, Pavel Minyuk were guest editors of this special issue.
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Lozhkin, A.V., Anderson, P.M., Matrosova, T.V. et al. The pollen record from El’gygytgyn Lake: implications for vegetation and climate histories of northern Chukotka since the late middle Pleistocene. J Paleolimnol 37, 135–153 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10933-006-9018-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10933-006-9018-5