Late Holocene Climatic and Environmental Change Inferred from Arctic Lake Sediments

This Dataset consists of data which accompanies fourteen papers in a special issue of the Journal of Paleolimnology. These papers report new records of Holocene climate and environmental change from Arctic lakes, with emphasis on the last 2000 years. The study sites span the high latitudes of North America and extend into northwestern Europe. The studies rely on multiple proxy indicators to reconstruct past climate, including: varve thicknesses, chironomid, diatom, and pollen assemblages, biogenic-silica and organic-matter content, oxygen-isotope ratios in diatoms, and the frequency of lake-ice-rafted aggregates. These proxies primarily document changes in past summer temperatures, the main control on physical and biological processes in lakes at high latitudes. The records will be integrated into a larger network of paleoclimate sites to investigate the spatial and temporal variability of climate change and to compare the paleoclimate inferences with the output of general circulation models. The project of which these data are a part contributes to understanding the Arctic system by placing 20th century climatic change into a longer-term context of inter-decadal climatic variability spanning the last 2000 years.