1974/06/01 by John V. Matthews Jr., John Matthews · 66 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Archaeology #Arctic #Beringia #Boreal #Climate change and permafrost #Ecology #Forestry #Geography #Geological Studies and Exploration #Geology #Geology and Paleoclimatology Research #Holocene #Macrofossil #Oceanography #Paleontology #Physical geography #Pollen #Stadial #Steppe #Subarctic climate #Taiga #Tundra #Vegetation (pathology)
paper · doi:10.1139/e74-083
published in Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 11(6), 828-841 (NRC Research Press)
openalex publication_date 1974/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Information on the Wisconsin environment of interior Alaska has been obtained from study of pollen as well as the plant and animal macrofossils contained in sediments of a 27 m core at Isabella Creek, near Fairbanks, Alaska. The pollen assemblages indicate three major zones.Zone A (35 000 to 32 000 BP) represents a mid-Wisconsin interstadial during which spruce treeline was lower in elevation than at present though not nearly as low as during early and late Wisconsin time. Zone B represents a late Wisconsin interval of severe arctic climate. Forests disappeared from interior Alaska or were greatly diminished and much of the region was characterized by steppe-tundra vegetation. Steppe conditions may have been favored by rapid deposition of primary and reworked loess. Zone C shows that spruce forests and some of the associated boreal biota had returned to interior Alaska by 8500 years BP. A fluctuation of alder percentages within Zone C may result from mid-Holocene warming.Plant macrofossils from the Isabella sequence show that some species now having a boreal or taiga distribution survived the late Wisconsin of interior Alaska in a steppe-tundra environment. Other plants that were growing at Isabella during mid-Wisconsin time apparently became extinct in Alaska during the late Wisconsin.