Project Details
Projekt
Deglacial and postglacial vegetation and fire history of the Lake Melville region, Canada (Acronym: MELPOLL)
Subject Area
Geology
Physical Geography
Physical Geography
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 560560208
Lake Melville is a fjord-type coastal inlet located close to the southeastern border of the former, highly dynamic Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS) in Labrador, Canada. The lake is ~250 km long and up to 250 m deep, and it has a sediment infill of up to 400 m. In 2019, we retrieved sediment cores from its uppermost sediment layers and from the adjacent shelf. The lake cores were spliced into a ~20 m long composite profile that spans the past ~13 kyrs, which reaches back ~3.4 kyrs prior to the LIS retreat at the coring position. First results indicate that the lake was not excavated but persisted underneath the LIS, remaining connected to the ocean. The lake hence offers a unique setting where we can study sediments from the Labrador interior that are older than postglacial. Additionally, we can study land-lake-ocean interactions by investigating the same samples with different techniques – without facing dating uncertainties. This makes Lake Melville an ideal drill site as part of a future amphibious Land-to-Sea transect within ICDP and IODP MSP. In this proposal, we suggest to conduct a high-resolution pollen study on the Lake Melville composite core to reconstruct the nature and timing of pioneering vegetation at the deglacial, further vegetation succession over time especially during the short-lived Holocene climate fluctuations, and eventually reconstruct climate parameters such as temperature and precipitation. Palynological data will be accompanied by sedaDNA metabarcoding to provide a more detailed reconstruction of past plant diversity. Microcharcoal types will be counted and fire-related biomarkers will be measured to provide first insights into past wildfire occurrence and frequencies in the Lake Melville region. The proposed high-resolution paleoenvironmental study will help to strengthen the climate-change models for the Canadian Arctic, and it will form a solid backbone for a future MagellanPlus workshop to establish a land-to-sea drilling proposal.
DFG Programme
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