Abstract ATM-9317569 Anderson, Patricia M. Brubaker, Linda B. University of Washington Title: Late Quaternary Climate of Western Beringia This award supports a project under paleoclimates in Arctic Lakes and Estuaries (PALE), a program that focuses on the timing, magnitude, and rates of change in arctic climates during the late Quaternary. Understanding the complex regional responses to past shifts in global climate requires: 1) the compilation of numerous well-dated records of paleoclimate indicators (e.g., pollen); 2) the calibration of these proxies by defining their modern climatic relationships; and 3) the comparison of climatic histories inferred from the paleo-data to qualitative or quantitative paleoclimatic models. Although such data set are available from lakes in many areas of the North American and European Arctic, comparable information is virtually absent from northern Siberia. This award supports a project designed to analyze pollen, spores, plant macrofossils, and sediment geochemistry of lake cores to reconstruct the late Quaternary vegetation and climate of Western Beringia (northeast Siberia). These histories will be reconstructed for six study areas, which today encompass the range of vegetation and climate in far northeast Russia. Analyses of surficial lake muds will improve the definition of modern pollen- vegetation-climate relationships and aid the paleoclimatic interpretation of fossil data. The new Russian data will allow a more detailed description of trans-Beringian paleovegetational patterns and inferred paleoclimates. Definition of such broad- scale patterns will help paleo-data/GCM comparisons for the Arctic, thereby improving the understanding of high latitude responses to global climatic changes.
