Pre-holocene and holocene pollen records of vegetation history from the Florida peninsula and their climatic implications

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Abstract

Pre-Holocene sediments may be found in sinkhole lakers or filled sinkholes in the Florida peninsula. Lake Tulane in south-central Florida yielded a core of 18.5 m under 22.7 m of water. The core extends from the present to ca. 50,000 yr B.P. It is age controlled by twenty radiocarbon dates. The pre-Holocene shows alternating peaks of Pinus (pine)-dominated and Quercus-Ambrosia (oak-ragweed)-dominated vegetation. The pine peaks correlate in detail with Heinrich events H1 to H5. This demonstrates linkage between continental and oceanic climate events. The pine peaks are thought to link with periods of relatively high precipitation and warm Gulf water during ice advances. Oak-ragweed peaks are thought to indicate aridity when the Gulf and North Atlantic surface waters were cooled by melwater from retreating ice sheets. Lake Grizelle is afilled sinkhole with several climatic episodes recorded in pollen counts which are separated from the Holocene by a hiatus marked by thick sand. It is representative of a category of fossil lakes in Florida which promise to contain long and perhaps interglacial pollen records. Sheelar Lake records the end of the Wisconsin and the assembling of a species-rich forest of mesic trees such as Fagus (beech) close to, or south of, their present southern geographic limits. This forest is believed to be ancestral to the mesic deciduous forest which invaded eastern North America in the next 3000 yr.

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