A 1400-Year Bølling-Allerød Tree-Ring Record from the U.S. Great Lakes Region

Abstract

Since the late 19th Century, geologists and naturalists working in the US Midwest have reported an abundance of tree macrofossils embedded in glacial and lacustrine deposits formed after the Last Glacial Maximum. The most widely-known of these sites is the Two Creeks type locality in Wisconsin. We report progress on development of a long tree-ring record from this subfossil wood in the US Great Lakes region, employing samples collected during a decade-long series of field campaigns at recently eroded lake shorelines, construction projects, and excavations, along with acquisition of archived samples collected from the 1950s to the 1980s during past lake erosion events. A previously-reported tree-ring chronology from the Two Creeks type locality reached ca. 250 years in length; here we used radiocarbon dates and tree-ring crossdating to develop a 1408-year tree-ring chronology (mainly spruce Picea spp. with some tamarack Larix) comprising a total of 135 overlapped tree-ring width series in three clusters from nine locations in eastern Wisconsin. The calendar age of the record is estimated with 46 14C dates to between 14,500 to 13,100 cal BP. This is currently the oldest and only long tree-ring record in North America from the boreal environments of the Bølling-Allerød warm period during the transition from the Late Glacial to the Holocene. © 2017 by The Tree-Ring Society.