WOOD JAMS OR BEAVER DAMS? PLIOCENE LIFE, SEDIMENT AND LANDSCAPE INTERACTIONS IN THE CANADIAN HIGH ARCTIC
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Authors
Gosse, John
Rouilard, Alexandra
Rybczynski, Natalia
Meng, Jin
Reyes, Alberto
Kiguktak, Jarloo
Journal Title
Palaios
ISSN
0883-1351
Publisher
Society for Sedimentary Geology (SEPM)
Type
Article
This Version
AM
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Davies, N., Gosse, J., Rouilard, A., Rybczynski, N., Meng, J., Reyes, A., & Kiguktak, J. WOOD JAMS OR BEAVER DAMS? PLIOCENE LIFE, SEDIMENT AND LANDSCAPE INTERACTIONS IN THE CANADIAN HIGH ARCTIC. Palaios https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.82220
Abstract
During the mid-Pliocene (Zanclean, ca. ~3.9 Ma), parts of the Canadian High Arctic
experienced mean annual temperatures that were 14-22°C warmer than today and
supported diverse boreal-type forests. The landscapes of this vegetated polar region
left behind a fragmented sedimentary record that crops out across several islands in
the Canadian Arctic Archipelago as the Beaufort Formation and correlative strata.
Paleoecological information from these strata provides a high-fidelity window onto
Pliocene environments, and prominent fossil sites yield unparalleled insights into
Cenozoic mammal evolution. Significantly, many of the strata reveal evidence for lifesediment
interactions in a warm-climate Arctic, most notably in the form of extensive
woody debris and phytoclast deposits. This paper presents original field data that
refines the sedimentological context of plant debris accumulations from the
anactualistic High Arctic forests, most notably at the ‘Fyles Leaf Beds’ and ‘Beaver
Pond’ fossil-bearing sites in the ‘high terrace deposits’ of central Ellesmere Island. The
former is a remarkably well-preserved, leaf-rich deposit that is part of a complex of
facies associations representing lacustrine, fluvio-deltaic and mire deposition above a
paleotopographic unconformity. The latter yields tooth-marked woody debris within a
peat layer that also contains a rich assemblage of vertebrate and plant fossils including
abundant remains from the extinct beaver-group Dipoides . Here we present
sedimentological data that provide circumstantial evidence that the woody debris
deposit at Beaver Pond could record dam-building in the genus, by comparing the
facies motif with new data from known Holocene beaver dam facies in England. Across
the Pliocene of the High Arctic region, woody debris accumulations are shown to
represent an array of biosedimentary deposits and landforms including mires,
driftcretions, woody bedforms, and possible beaver dams, which help to contextualize
mammal fossil sites, provide facies models for high-latitude forests, and reveal
interactions between life and sedimentation in a vanished world that may be an
analogue to that of the near-future.
Sponsorship
NERC (Unknown)
Embargo Lift Date
2025-03-08
Identifiers
This record's DOI: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.82220
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/334790
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