Abstract
The Late Glacial and Holocene climate of the western North Pacific is less studied than that of the eastern North Pacific. While it is well known that strong east-west gradients in the tropical Pacific Ocean influence terrestrial climate, we seek to better understand how these gradients are expressed in the northern extratropics. Towards this aim, we present an organic and stable isotope geochemical and macrofossil record from a peatland on the east coast of the Kamchatka peninsula. We find that both the early and late Holocene were wetter, with a different assemblage of plants from the middle Holocene, which was drier, with more episodic precipitation. The large ecohydrological changes at several points during the Holocene are contemporaneous with and of the same sense as those we find at places to the east, such as south-central Alaska and to the south, in northern Japan. We also find that the middle Holocene period of warmth, dryness and low carbon accumulation occur contemporaneously with an enhanced east-west gradient in tropical Pacific sea surface temperature. This suggests that that hydroclimatic conditions in the subarctic can be influenced by tropical dynamics.
Highlights
Peatlands are an important part of the global carbon cycle, storing, at a minimum, 550 Gt of carbon in the form of partially decayed organic matter (Turetsky et al, 2015)
We find that the current precipitation δD at the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky Global Network for Isotopes in Precipitation (GNIP) monitoring station is depleted relative to the Holocene values that we reconstruct (Figure 6) and modeled values (Risi et al, 2012)
Vegetation, hydrology, climate, and carbon accumulation rate are closely linked at Newmarket Fen
Summary
Peatlands are an important part of the global carbon cycle, storing, at a minimum, 550 Gt of carbon in the form of partially decayed organic matter (Turetsky et al, 2015). Climate and vegetation type are well-known influences on the rate of carbon accumulation in ombrotrophic peatlands, but less is known about the role of nutrient cycling. We investigate influence of climate on vegetation, carbon accumulation, and nutrient cycling in a typical fen environment. The early Holocene, from about 10 ka to 7 ka, was moist and cool, transitioning to a warm, dry, and windy climate during the middle Holocene from about 6.5 to at least 5 ka (Andrén et al, 2015; Solovieva et al, 2015). Too have been measured in various locations throughout the peninsula, and during periods of cool and/or moist climate, as in both the early Holocene and the Neoglacial, peat carbon accumulation is higher than during the dry and/or warm period of the middle Holocene (Zakharikhina, 2014; Turetsky et al, 2015)
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