INVESTIGATING ALLENBERG BOG TO CONSTRAIN THE PALEOCLIMATE HISTORY OF WESTERN NEW YORK

We analyzed the post-glacial sediment from Allenberg Bog located just outside of Napoli, western New York. Miller (1969) extracted sediment cores from the same site. He extracted ˜15 m of post-glacial sediment near the LGM terminal moraine and produced a pollen record, but never dated them. Our goal is to constrain western New York's environmental change following Laurentide Ice Sheet retreat in order to assess changes across the Late Pleistocene-Holocene transition. The Allenberg Bog site covers 1.5783 km² and contains a small pond (1,858 m²) of open water surrounded by a discontinuous low shrub zone interspersed with dead trees, eventually giving way to a wooded forest. Following probing of a dozen locations to get a sense of bog depth, we extracted sediment cores from two locations within the bog adjacent to the open water pond. Sediments at each location were probed with a Russian peat corer and eventually collected with a Livingstone coring system in successive one-meter-long drives. At location 1 (15ABB-1: 42.251°, -78.883°) we only obtained basal sediments, which produced 0.3 m of sediment starting 10.0 m below the bog surface. At location 2 (15ABB-7: 42.252°, -78.883°) we collected 6.6 m of sediment from a depth of 8.0 m to 14.6 m below the bog surface. We completed basic sediment analyses (moisture content, density, organic matter content, and magnetic susceptibility) at a 5 cm resolution with the exception of basal core segments. One cm resolution was used on the basal sediments, and we are in the process of increasing the resolution to 1 cm on the rest of the cores. The overall core stratigraphy contains basal sediments that are glacial or near-glacial, overlain by lacustrine sediments and followed by peat. These post-glacial changes in sedimentation create a timeline that will be constrained by radiocarbon dating, pending at the time of abstract submission. Location 1 (15ABB-1) will have two radiocarbon dates and location 2 (15ABB-7) will have four radiocarbon dates. These dates will be used to create age-depth models for each core that compare sediment density, organic content, and moisture content. From this information we will learn when prominent climatic changes occurred in western New York.