ARCTIC Mackenzie River Driftwood- A Dendrochronological Study

• Main Author: Olafur Eggertsson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1993
• Subjects: Arctic; Greenland; Liard; Mackenzie Delta; Mackenzie River; Svalbard; East Greenland; east greenland current; Iceland; Liard River; Mackenzie river; North Atlantic; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.524.8219; http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic47-2-128.pdf

ABSTRACT. As part of a geqeral study of arctic driftwood, 206 samples of driftwood logs from the Mackenzie delta area were analyzed by dendrochronological methods (tree-ring studies). The aim was to detect the origin of the wood. Three forest stands in the delta were also sampled, and tree-ring chronologies were constructed. The Mackenzie driftwood can be divided into four groups: 1) driftwood originating from the upper Mackenzie delta area with individual logs having up to 600 tree rings, 2) driftwood originating near the southern limit of the delta, 3) Wood with relatively few tree rings with possible origin in the Liard River drainage area, and 4) driftwood samples not datable with any available chronologies. Three driftwood samples from the Coast of Greenland could be correlated with tree-ring chronologies from the Mackenzie delta area and another three were correlated with chronologies from Alaska. American driftwood has not been detected in collections from Svalbard and Iceland, although more than 200 samples have been analyzed from each area. This indicates that some American driftwood is trans-ported from the Beaufort and Bering seas to the North Atlantic Ocean, probably via the western part of the East Greenland Current,. This wood is deposited on the Coast of Greenland. American driftwood probably does not reach the islands in the central and eastern North Atlantic.