| Summary: | Radiocarbon dates on formerly ice-entombed tundra plants collected within 1 meter (m) of the current ice margin of rapidly receding ice caps on northern Baffin Island to test the concept of volcanic forcing on episodic ice cap expansion during the Common Era. The goal of this project is to examine the rate of onset of persistent Little Ice Age (LIA) cold by dating 50 new samples from current ice margins from ice complexes in Baffin Island, Canada, and comparing them to similar collections from 2005. If LIA ice expansion was abrupt and persistent then dates on the new plants should be about the same age as the 2005 samples, 200 to 500 m distant. Whereas if summers slowly cooled over decades-to-centuries through the late Holocene, then the new dates will be significantly older than their 2005 counterparts. Collectively, these data will provide the most robust testing of an abrupt onset of LIA cold and will be of interest to the sea ice and climate modeling communities.
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