Abstract
Because of the lack of long-term instrumentally-recorded climatic data from Nunavut, proxy records of past climate must be relied upon to obtain a perspective on climate and associated environmental variability in the area. Currently, such records are limited, but point to a general pattern of late Holocene cooling, following an early to mid Holocene warm episode. There is considerable evidence that the most recent neoglacial episode, which culminated in the mid to late 19th century, was one of the coldest, if not the coldest period in the Holocene. The subsequent 20th century warming has been, by contrast, one of the warmest periods in the late Holocene. In the last 200 years, therefore, Nunavut has witnessed a range of environmental change that may be representative of many thousands of years. To document these changes, and to try and resolve their causes, high resolution proxy records of past climate are needed. Only laminated lake sediments and ice cores have the potential of providing the necessary detail, and spatial coverage necessary for this task. We recommend that multi-proxy studies of laminated lake sediments be conducted throughout Nunavut, to supplement the information currently available from ice cores, and that further ice cores be recovered from appropriate sites along the mountainous interior of the eastern Canadian Arctic. In both cases, detailed studies must be carried out to fully calibrate the climate signal in the proxy record, to provide confidence in the veracity of any resulting paleoclimate reconstructions.