Younger Dryas glacial advance in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada: analogue for ice inception?

Abstract

In the summer of 1999, the Maritimes and Northeast Pipeline Company excavated a 3‐m‐deep trench across northern Nova Scotia exposing a continuous transect of surficial deposits along a 237‐km corridor. A Lateglacial palaeosol with preserved A horizon (peat and wood) buried under 2–10 m of surface till consisted mainly of herbaceous plant material with few large wood fragments. Large pieces of wood from two sites yielded conventional radiocarbon ages of 10.9 14C kyr BP (GSC‐6435) and 10.8 14C kyr BP (GSC‐6419). Previous to these finds, only a few localities were known to reveal till overlying peat, so the extent of Younger Dryas (YD) glaciers could not be clearly established. Glacial flow lines indicated by fabric and fluting of the YD surface till sheet in northern Nova Scotia and ice‐marginal deposits imply an ice cap centred over eastern P.E.I. and the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. This glacier also dammed a series of glacial lakes against the highland‐rimmed west coast of Cape Breton Island. Glaciers developed and advanced during the YD in the uplands and offshore shelf areas from small remnants of Late Wisconsinan ice. Renewed ice growth was enabled by increased precipitation and local cooling in the Gulf of St. Lawrence due to deflection of the jet stream and expanded sea‐ice cover in the North Atlantic. The YD may provide an analogy to glacier development in Maritime Canada during the interglacial/glacial transition.