Sediment core data related to the extinction of Mammuthus primigenius, St. Paul Island, Alaska, 2014

This project will provide new data on the paleoclimates, paleoenviroments and the biodiversity impacts of sea level rise on the southern edge of the Bering Land Bridge (BLB), and is intended to facilitate a better understanding of why woolly mammoths survived late into the mid-Holocene only in the environments of Arctic islands of this area. Furthermore, this research will attempt to establish the actual time of extinction of the Holocene mammoth population on St. Paul Island, Pribilof Islands, Alaska, and apply this information to test various proposed causal hypotheses for the extinction. Relict woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) populations survived on several small Beringian islands for thousands of years after mainland populations went extinct. Here, we present new multi-proxy paleoenvironmental records to investigate the timing, causes, and consequences of mammoth disappearance from St. Paul Island, Alaska, USA. These proxies include pollen, spores, cladocerans, diatoms, oxygen isotopes, C:N, MS, 14C data, tephra, LOI and aDNA.