Lateral transport of sediment and organic matter, derived from coastal erosion, into the nearshore zone of the southern Beaufort Sea, Canada

• Main Author: Pfalz, Gregor
• Format: Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Beaufort Sea; Climate change; Herschel; Mackenzie Delta; Yukon
• Online Access: https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/44364/; https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/44364/1/Master_Thesis_Gregor_Pfalz_2017.pdf; https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.50702; https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.50702.d001

Herschel Basin is a natural depression on the southern Beaufort Shelf, which is located in the western Canadian Arctic between the Mackenzie Delta and the Alaskan border. The submarine basin of late Wisconsin age is a natural sediment trap for material eroded along the Yukon coast and through its unique position within the area also a valuable paleoenvironmental archive. During a field campaign in spring 2016, a thirteen meter long sediment core was obtained from the Herschel Basin. The aim of this Master’s thesis was to quantify the amount of carbon, nitrogen and sediment with terrestrial origin throughout the sediment column from the Herschel Basin. The increasing research effort to understand the dynamics of Arctic coasts is justified by their contribution to the global carbon budget and their vulnerability. The results showed that the majority of sediment found in the sediment column of the Herschel Basin could be assigned to a mix of riverine and terrestrial/coastal inputs. However, the individual percentage of each input (marine, fluvial and terrestrial) could not be distinguished, due to lack of data. In conclusion, this thesis showed that in the Arctic nearshore zone coastal erosion affected by climate change will definitely have a negative impact on “[…] climate feedbacks, on nearshore food webs, and on local communities, whose survival still relies on marine biological resources”(M. Fritz et al., 2017).