| Summary: | Dinoflagellates representing mainly unicellular microorganisms with a wide nutrient spectrum are one of the main phytoplankton components in the Arctic shelf seas. Although only some of them form cysts preserved in sediments, they allow reconstruction of various parameters in a sea basin, such as temperature and salinity of surface waters, presence of sea ice, and genesis and distribution of main watermass types. These properties ensure the increasing significance of cysts in stratigraphic and paleoceanographic studies of Arctic seas. At present, the species and quantitative composition of these aqueous palynomorphs in bottom sediments is more or less known for almost all the Arctic sea basins of Eurasia except for the East Siberian and White seas. Thus, the data presented in this work represent the first information on dinoflagellates in bottom sediments of the White Sea, the unique (in biogeochemical characteristics) Arctic basin, which can be used in paleoceanograpbic reconstructions.
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