47 Records of Environmental Change from Lacustrine Archives (Posters)

Tuesday, 22 March 2016
1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Convention Hall

INVESTIGATING ALLENBERG BOG TO CONSTRAIN THE PALEOCLIMATE HISTORY OF WESTERN NEW YORK

Paper number: 47-17
Program: Theme Sessions
Time: 1:30 PM – 5:30 PM

Authors

Abstract

We analyzed the post-glacial sediment from Allenberg Bog located just outside of Napoli, western New York. Miller (1969) extracted sediment cores from the same site. He extracted ˜15 m of post-glacial sediment near the LGM terminal moraine and produced a pollen record, but never dated them. Our goal is to constrain western New York's environmental change following Laurentide Ice Sheet retreat in order to assess changes across the Late Pleistocene-Holocene transition. The Allenberg Bog site covers 1.5783 km2 and contains a small pond (1,858 m2) of open water surrounded by a discontinuous low shrub zone interspersed with dead trees, eventually giving way to a wooded forest. Following probing of a dozen locations to get a sense of bog depth, we extracted sediment cores from two locations within the bog adjacent to the open water pond. Sediments at each location were probed with a Russian peat corer and eventually collected with a Livingstone coring system in successive one-meter-long drives. At location 1 (15ABB-1: 42.251°, -78.883°) we only obtained basal sediments, which produced 0.3 m of sediment starting 10.0 m below the bog surface. At location 2 (15ABB-7: 42.252°, -78.883°) we collected 6.6 m of sediment from a depth of 8.0 m to 14.6 m below the bog surface. We completed basic sediment analyses (moisture content, density, organic matter content, and magnetic susceptibility) at a 5 cm resolution with the exception of basal core segments. One cm resolution was used on the basal sediments, and we are in the process of increasing the resolution to 1 cm on the rest of the cores. The overall core stratigraphy contains basal sediments that are glacial or near-glacial, overlain by lacustrine sediments and followed by peat. These post-glacial changes in sedimentation create a timeline that will be constrained by radiocarbon dating, pending at the time of abstract submission. Location 1 (15ABB-1) will have two radiocarbon dates and location 2 (15ABB-7) will have four radiocarbon dates. These dates will be used to create age-depth models for each core that compare sediment density, organic content, and moisture content. From this information we will learn when prominent climatic changes occurred in western New York.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 48, No. 1

doi: 10.1130/abs/2016NE-272311

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