PALEOLIMNOLOGICAL COMPARISON OF TWO SUBBASINS IN TUPPER LAKE, ADIRONDACK PARK, NEW YORK

From the earliest days of the modern environmental movement, the Adirondack region of Upstate New York has been vulnerable to anthropogenic impacts. Since the 1850s, Tupper Lake in Franklin County, NY has experienced more logging operations than any other body of water in the Adirondacks. The lake’s watershed contains over 250 km of roads, making it an ideal lake to study for human-caused environmental change. We recovered five sediment cores from Tupper Lake to study the effects of human activities on the physical and chemical properties of the lake. These cores range in length from 64 cm to 79 cm. Three cores are from the northern basin, which is proximal to the township of Tupper Lake and the Raquette River, the major source of water and sediment to the basin. The other two cores are from the southern basin, ~3.5 km to the south. Initial core description reveals massive blackish-brown clay as the dominant lithology of the cores. Three of the cores contain visible plant matter. Subsurface CHIRP (compressed high-intensity radiated pulse) data shows high gas/organic content at our core sites, suggesting a relatively high percentage of organic material in the sediments. One of the cores from the south basin (18-TUP-04) has 9 cm of greenish mud at the bottom of the core, which differs from the lithologies observed in the northern basin cores. Smear slide analysis shows this greenish layer from 18-TUP-04 contains a greater percentage of minerals and siliciclastics than the rest of the sediments at this core site, which are dominated by organics and diatoms. Comparisons between these two sets of cores provide the opportunity to evaluate inter-basin variability. These differences are interpreted as a function of the northern basins close proximity to the higher energy of the Raquette River.