Shortly after the publication of PAGES2K, I pointed out that the Igaliku lake sediment proxy, had been contaminated by modern agricultural runoff. The post attracted many comments.
Nick Stokes vigorously opposed the surmise that the Igaliku series had been contaminated by modern agriculture and/or that such contamination should have been taken into account by Kaufman and associates. Stokes:
I see earlier demands that selection criteria be declared for proxies. Kaufman has done that, and appears to have stuck with them. But when a spike appears, suddenly the CA throng has a thousand a posteriori reasons why Kaufman is a reprobate for not throwing it out.
or
I see no reason to disagree with the original authors, Massa et al in saying that “pollen accumulation appears to document climatic changes of the last millennia nonetheless”. The Betula/Salix counts are not contaminated.
Subsequent to my CA post, the Igaliku specialists have published a new article entitled “Lake Sediments as an Archive of Land use and Environmental Change in the Eastern Settlement, Southwestern Greenland” (abstract here) which unambiguously connected soil erosion to agriculture, not just in the modern period, but in the medieval period, observing that modern mechanization in the 1980s had resulted in a “five times” the rate of erosion.
Palaeoenvironmental studies from continental and marine sedimentary archives have been conducted over the last four decades in the archaeologically rich Norse Eastern Settlement in Greenland. Those investigations, briefly reviewed in this paper, have improved our knowledge of the history of the Norse colonization and its associated environmental changes. Although deep lakes are numerous, their deposits have been little used in the Norse context. Lakes that meet specific lake-catchment criteria, as outlined in this paper, can sequester optimal palaeoenvironmental records, which can be highly sensitive to both climate and/or human forcing. Here we present a first synthesis of results from a well-dated 2000-year lake-sediment record from Lake Igaliku, located in the center of the Eastern Settlement and close to the Norse site Garðar. A continuous, high-resolution sedimentary record from the deepest part of the lake provides an assessment of farming-related anthropogenic change in the landscape, as well as a quantitative comparison of the environmental impact of medieval colonization (AD 985—ca. AD 1450) with that of recent sheep farming (AD 1920—present). Pollen and non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs) indicate similar magnitudes of land clearance marked mainly by a loss of tree-birch pollen, a rise in weed taxa, as well as an increase in coprophilous fungi linked to the introduction of grazing livestock. During the two phases of agriculture, soil erosion estimated by geochemical proxies and sediment-accumulation rate exceeds the natural or background erosion rate. Between AD 1010 to AD 1180, grazing activities accelerated soil erosion up to ≈8 mm century-1, twice the natural background rate. A decrease in the rate of erosion is recorded from ca. AD 1230, indicating a progressive decline of agro-pastoral activities well before the end of the Norse occupation of the Eastern Settlement. This decline could be related to possible climate instabilities and may also be indirect evidence for the shift towards a more marine-based diet shown by archaeological studies. Mechanization of agriculture in the 1980s caused unprecedented soil erosion up to ≈21 mm century-1, five times the pre-anthropogenic levels. Over the same period, diatom assemblages show that the lake has become steadily more mesotrophic, contrary to the near-stable trophic conditions of the preceding millennia. These results reinforce the potential of lake-sediment studies paired with archaeological investigations to understand the relationship between climate, environment, and human societies.
I recently noticed that my criticism had been more or less conceded in McKay and Kaufman 2014, which purported to accommodate the contamination (or overprinting, as suggested by Mosher) by deleting the last two points. I was critical of their correction, arguing that their correction still leaves a heavily contaminated reading in 1970. (The next reading is dated circa 1910 – its’ very low resolution and actually below the resolution standard of the study).
It’s hard to tell whether this was intentional or not. I can see one way that they might have left in this value by accident. If they had deleted two points from the PAGES2K-2013 version, that would have also deleted the contaminated 1970 point. But the PAGES-2013 had already omitted or removed one point from the underlying NOAA version. The new McKay and Kaufman version deleted two points from the NOAA version, and thus only one point from the PAGES2K-2013 version, still leaving the contaminated 1970 reading.
Or, if pressed, perhaps they would argue that the most recent article only expressly referred to mechanization “in the 1980s”. However, this hardly precludes the likelihood that the elevated erosion observed in the sample dated circa 1970 could not similarly be attributed to mechanization occurring earlier than the 1980s (farm mechanization obviously occurring throughout the world long before the 1980s) or dating error.
The series should never have been used in a temperature reconstruction.
Note: Jean S and I have been doing some interesting analysis of paico and it is my present view that Igaliku does not have a large impact on the paico reconstruction, but does have a large impact on the “basic composite” reconstruction, one of the PAGES2K alternatives.