Search for: All records

Monosaccharide anhydrides (MAs), or anhydrosugars which include levoglucosan, mannosan, and galactosan are combustion products of cellulose and hemicellulose that are used as biomass burning tracers. These fire biomarkers are incorporated into smoke plumes, transported through the atmosphere, and return to the surface through wet and dry deposition that can be archived in ice cores. Here, we quantify levoglucosan, mannosan, and galactosan through the Denali ice core to investigate past North Pacific fire activity. 

This project intends to use the Mount Denali ice core archive to develop the most comprehensive suite of North Pacific fire and summer climate proxy records since about 2500 years before present. Wildfire is a key component of summer climate in the North Pacific where wildfires are projected to increase with continued summer warming. Studies that combine paleorecords of summer climate and wildfire are therefore critically needed, especially in the North Pacific region where fire recurrence rate and decadal-to-centennial scale climate fluctuations occur over longer time periods than are covered by direct observations. The goal of the proposed research is to improve our understanding of relationships between summertime climate and wildfire activity, focusing especially on the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), when regional temperatures were perhaps as warm as the 20th century. Recent advances now permit the measurement of new fire-related (pyrogenic) compounds in ice cores, enabling the development of a robust fire record capable of rigorous comparison with regional paleoclimate reconstructions.