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Mid-to-late Holocene climate change record in palaeo-notch sediment from London Island, Svalbard

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Abstract

The Arctic region is very sensitive to climate change and important in the Earth’s climate system. However, proxy datasets for Arctic climate are unevenly distributed and especially scarce for Svalbard because glaciers during the Little Ice Age, the most extensive in the Holocene, destroyed large quantities of sediment records in Svalbard. Fortunately, palaeo-notch sediments could withstand glaciers and be well-preserved after deposition. In this study, we reconstructed a mid-to-late Holocene record of climate changes in a palaeo-notch sediment sequence from London Island. Multiple weathering indices were determined, they all showed consistent weathering conditions in the study area, and they were closely linked to climate changes. Total organic carbon (TOC) and total nitrogen (TN) were also determined, and their variation profiles were similar to those of weathering indices. The climate change record in our sediment sequence is consistent with ice rafting record from North Atlantic and glacier activity from Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard, and four cold periods are clearly present. Our study provides a relatively long-term climate change record for climate conditions from mid-to-late Holocene in Svalbard.

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported by Chinese Polar Environment Comprehensive Investigation and Assessment Programmes (CHINARE2017-02-01, CHINARE2017-04-04 and CHINARE2017-04-03). Sample information and data were issued by the Resource-sharing Platform of Polar Samples (http://birds.chinare.org.cn) maintained by Polar Research Institute of China (PRIC) and Chinese National Arctic and Antarctic Data Center (CN-NADC). We thank the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration and PRIC for the logistic support in field.

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  1. Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Polar Environment and Global Change, School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Zhongkang Yang & Liguang Sun

  2. Institute of Polar Environment, School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Zhongkang Yang, Liguang Sun, Xin Zhou & Yuhong Wang

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  1. Zhongkang Yang
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Correspondence to Liguang Sun.

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Corresponding editor: D Shankar

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Yang, Z., Sun, L., Zhou, X. et al. Mid-to-late Holocene climate change record in palaeo-notch sediment from London Island, Svalbard. J Earth Syst Sci 127, 57 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-018-0956-x

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