Holocene sediment physical properties in four southwest Greenland lakes, 2016-2018

The climate and ice sheet history of Greenland are important to reconstruct for providing a longer-term context to ongoing changes. The goal of this award was to determine how sensitively past Arctic ice sheets responded to abrupt climate change on the order of global warming. To do this, the Principal Investigators (PIs) generated histories of ice sheet and glacier changes from Greenland and Arctic Canada spanning the last period in Earth history of major ice sheet demise (~12,000 to ~7000 years ago) using both lake sediment records and chronologies of moraines using cosmogenic nuclide exposure dating. The PIs and their graduate students visited remote parts of Greenland to collect geologic samples from features - still preserved on the landscapes today – that were generated when vast ice sheets retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. With these samples, the group reconstructed the timing of past ice sheet and climate changes. This dataset contains downcore analyses for sediment cores from four lakes in Southwest Greenland.