STABLE LATE HOLOCENE LEAF WAX CHAIN LENGTH DISTRIBUTIONS IN THE HUDSON STRAIT

Understanding paleoenvironmental change in the Arctic, a region especially sensitive to warming, is important for understanding environmental and climate changes in the modern day. Proxies such as leaf waxes preserved in marine sediments help display these changes. Leaf waxes are protective coatings on the surfaces of plant leaves. They are comprised of hydrocarbon chains, the length of which provides valuable information on the changes in the area’s vegetation composition. The Hudson Strait is a unique area located in the Arctic Canada due to its variable ice coverage and salinity levels throughout the year. We report results from a marine sediment core from eastern Hudson Strait (61.5075°, 71.1742°) that spans the late Holocene. We sub-sampled the marine sediment core and analyzed the concentration of leaf wax n-alkanoic acid homologs using gas chromatography with a flame ionization detector. We found that all chain lengths (C₂₀-C₃₂) stayed stable throughout the record, with C₂₄-C₂₈ having the highest abundance. These abundances remained stable except for a greater input of C₂₀ and C₂₂ n-alkanoic acids that occurred in one sample around 2,000 years ago. Our aim is to figure out what caused these changes in the leaf wax chain length abundances within the cores.