Late Holocene diatom biostratigraphy and sea-level changes in the southeastern Beaufort Sea

Late Holocene sediments from the Atkinson Point area were analysed to provide quantitative reconstructions of recent sea-level changes in the southeastern Beaufort Sea. The succession of diatom assemblages in five cores revealed paleoenvironmental changes induced by the transgression of the Beaufort Sea during successive periods of lacustrine conditions, breaching and flooding of thermokarst lakes by the sea, and the landward migration of sandy spits. Based on radiocarbon dates and quantitative paleodepth determinations, a relative sea-level curve for the late Holocene has been developed. Despite a loss of temporal precision due to old carbon contamination, an envelope of sea-level change has been defined for the last 2 ka BP, suggesting a sea-level rise in the order of 1.1 mm a-1 for the last millennium. This paper presents the first sea-level reconstruction inferred from a diatom-based transfer function. It represents an improvement over traditional methods which were limited to qualitative estimates of...

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