Abstract
The Arctic is one of the key regions of the Earth's climatic system and lacustrine sediment archives provide us with plentiful information on the past climatic and environmental changes. Postglacial climatic development in Greenland, with evidence of the Holocene Thermal Maximum and past configuration of Greenland Ice Sheet, is therefore reasonably well constrained (Briner et al.2016).
Few palaeoenvironmental studies, however, offer detailed ,high-resolution records of the last millennium, when Norse colonisation (landnám) and climatic variations such as the Mediaeval Climate Anomaly (MCA), the Little Ice Age (LIA) or recent warming took place (D'Andrea et al. 2011; Larsen et al. 2017). Moreover, the region around the capital Nuuk has so far yielded only Holocene-scale reconstruction of glacier variability in the Kobbefjord area (Larsen et al. 2017) and Late Holocene marine record from Ameralikfjord (Seidenkrantz et al. 2007).
Our study aims to provide a record of environmental and climatic changes at higher temporal resolution to fill the void between relatively short instrumental measurements and often to ocoarse Holocene palaeoenvironmental reconstructions. We therefore focused on retrieving sedimentary sequence from depositional setting of infilled basins with a prospect of higher accumulation rates than is usual for Arctic lakes.
Despite the problems with dating and discontinuities, the records from such setting seem to provide promising archives (Edwards et al. 2011). From the palaeoclimatic point of view, we were also interested in the imprint of wider climatic teleconnections such as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).