Galloway, J.M., Macumber, A., Patterson, R.T., Falck, H., Hadlari, T., Madsen, E. 2010. Paleoclimatological assessment of the southern Northwest Territories and implications for the long-term viability of the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road, Part 1: Core Collection. NWT Open Report 2010-002, 23 pages.
This pilot program is part of a larger, ongoing research program that will provide data obtained from biological and chemical analyses of lake sediments and tree rings to track climate change over the past ca. 4000 years in the southern Northwest Territories. The primary data will be complemented by traditional accounts of past climate variability. The goals of the larger project will be to increase the current understanding of natural climate variability in the southern Northwest Territories in general, and the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Raod in partoicular, to increase the knowledge base required for better predictions as to how current and forecasted climate may affect the ecosystems of this region. The pilot program represents the first attempt to collect freeze cores in the southern Northwest Territories. Three freeze cores and ssociated water quality measurements were collected from Tibbitt Lake, Waite Lake, and Dome Lake, located along the TIbbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road between March 19th and March 22nd, 2009. All cores are primarily composed of mud and range in colour from black to brown. Freeze coring captured the unconsolidated seciment-water interface in two cores and it is concluded that freeze coring is an appropriate meghod for sediment core collection in northern lakes. Radiocarbon ages on bulk sediment samples from ROAD09-WAITE01 indicate that post-glacial sedimentation rates in Waite Lake are high relative to more northerly sites and confirms that high-resolution (mm scale) sub-smapling of the core will permit decada to sub-decadal analysies of lake Holocene cliamte change. The pilot program has also been successful in obtaining sediment samples form the sediment-water interface of lakes near Yellowknife. These samples were collected to develop a thecamoebian-based training set for the quantitative inference of climate parameters from fossil communities preserved in the sediments of lakes laong the Tibbitt to Conwoyto Winter Road.