This award will support an interaction between: 1) glacial response, 2) sea-level variations, and 3) climate, around the margin of the Laurentide Ice Sheet in the vicinity of Hudson Strait and Frobisher Bay, Eastern Canadian Arctic. The focus for the investigation includes two major moraine forming intervals, the Hall and Frobisher Bay moraines, that are C-14 dated at greater than 10.3 and ca. 8.4 thousands years respectively. The former may be coeval with the Younger Dryas stadial of NW Europe; the latter is a major event (Cockburn Substage) around the residual Laurentide Ice Sheet. Studies on mass physical properties, texture, pollen, and diatoms will be undertaken on a series of lake cores. One of the critical problems in arctic lake studies is C-14 dating of sediments with very low organic contents. This problem will be investigated by: 1) comparisons between AMS dates on macrofossils and bulk sediment dates; and 2) studies to document the C-14 inventory of two small lake basins which include sampling soils, raised marine sediments, water, and lake sediments.
