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Carleton College

Publication Date

Fall 2016

Program Name

Iceland and Greenland: Climate Change and The Arctic

Abstract

Consistenly-deposited lake sediments provide some of the highest resolution records of local and global climates in the past, offering the potential to better understand modern climate change in the context of past climate variability. In relating proxies to their respective climate regimes, the environmental cues that the specific proxies reacted to must be isolated from the general noise of possible local influences. In this investigation, biogenic silica (BSi), total organic carbon (TOC), δ13C values, and carbon: nitrogen ratios were analyzed between lakes through northern Iceland, to review possible complicating factors specific to the use of lacustrine proxies in the interpretation of climate events through the Late Holocene. The chosen lakes are likey to have reacted similarly to large-scale climate trends as experienced by the north of Iceland, given the proximity of these bodies of water to eachother, and the decadal-scale periodicity that characterized the Late Holocene in this part of the northern North Atlantic. However, differences between the lakes’ sediment records may be linked to within-lake, catchment and region-specific influences involving both ecological threshold behavior and geological processes. This study aims to tease apart these links in the hopes of illustrating the appropriateness of conceptual models like Blenckner’s landscape and lake filters as applied to previously-published work in the field.

Disciplines

Environmental Health | Environmental Studies | Geographic Information Sciences | Geography | Nature and Society Relations | Physical and Environmental Geography | Scandinavian Studies

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