Abstract
Antarctica plays a significant role in regulating the global climate, mainly due to its geographic position, characterized by the freezing climate and high albedo. Antarctica attributes this attribute amid several paleoclimatic questions ranging from global warming to Antarctic ice sheet melting associated with sea-level rise. Thus, reconstructing the Antarctic past-climate is of prime importance in understanding and modelling future climatic changes. Many lakes in Antarctica remained free from the continental ice sheet’s influence during the last glacial maxima. Hence, their sedimentary archives are a repository of paleoclimatic evidence for the Late Quaternary. Paleoclimatic studies using lake sediments drew scientific attention due to their efficiency to record long, high-resolution climate records. Recent studies have employed multiple proxies like environmental magnetism, isotope geochemistry, petrography, sedimentology, and geochronology on lake sediments of Schirmacher Oasis to decipher the past climate and the prevailing ecological conditions. The existing studies poorly record climatic events such as the Mid-Holocene Hypsithermal and neoglacial cooling. Despite better chronometric control in these studies, coarse temporal resolution and sparsely documented finer-scale climatic variations place the need for future high resolution works in the East Antarctic region.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Secretary-MoES and the Director, ESSO-NCPOR, for their encouragement and support under the project “Past Climate and Oceanic Variability”. The authors thank the Logistics Division and members of the 28th Indian Scientific Expedition to Antarctica for their help. AKW acknowledges the financial support provided by the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research, Ministry of Earth Sciences, in the form of a research project (Sanction: NCPOR/2019/PACER-POP/ES-02 dated 05/07/ 2019) under the PACER Outreach Programme (POP) initiative. This is NCPOR contribution no. B-3/2021-22.
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Warrier, A.K., Mahesh, B.S., Sebastian, J.G., Sali, A.S.Y., Mohan, R. (2022). A Synthesis of Glacial-Interglacial Paleoenvironmental Records from Lake Sediments of Schirmacher Oasis, East Antarctica. In: Khare, N. (eds) Assessing the Antarctic Environment from a Climate Change Perspective. Earth and Environmental Sciences Library. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87078-2_8
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