Plant wax n-alkanes measured in Baikal Drilling Project core materials

An 8.6-million-year record of plant wax n-alkane distributions from Lake Baikal, Russia. Plant wax n-alkanes are a useful indicator of paleovegetation change due to the tendency of different plant growth forms to produce different chain length n-alkanes. In Siberia and Mongolia, the C27 n-alkane often dominates the distribution of leaf waxes in conifer needles, woody shrubs, and Late Quaternary sedimentary horizons associated with taiga (Russian boreal forest) pollen assemblages while the C31 n-alkane often dominates herbaceous vegetation and Late Quaternary sediments with steppe pollen distributions. These observations are consistent with studies of surficial sedimentary n-alkane distributions elsewhere, including boreal environments in Canada analogous to the Lake Baikal region.