Book ChapterDOI
Early Tertiary Vegetation of Arctic Canada and Its Relevance to Paleoclimatic Interpretation
James F. Basinger,David R. Greenwood,David R. Greenwood,T. Sweda,T. Sweda +4 more
- pp 175-198
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
Early Tertiary fossil plants representing polar Arcto-Tertiary vegetation are found on Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg islands, northernmost of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.Abstract:
Early Tertiary fossil plants representing polar Arcto-Tertiary vegetation are found on Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg islands, northernmost of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Growing at a paleolatitude of 75–80 °N, these forests experienced prolonged periods of continuous daylight in the summer and continuous darkness in winter. The primarily deciduous vegetation, including members of the Taxodiaceae, Cupressaceae, Pinaceae, Ginkgoaceae, Platanaceae, Juglandaceae, Betulaceae, Menispermaceae, Cercidiphyllaceae, Ulmaceae, Fagaceae, and Magnoliaceae, clearly indicates that summer growing conditions were mild and moist, a conclusion supported by breadth and uniformity of annual growth increments of wood and by estimates of structure and productivity of forests. More significantly, probable frost-sensitive members of, for example, the Taxodiaceae, as well as fossil crocodilians and other frost-sensitive animals indicate that severe frost never occurred, even during the long, dark winter. Cold month mean temperatures of 0–4 °C, warm month mean of >25 °C, and mean annual temperature of 12–15 °C are estimated. These estimates are higher than those derived from physiognomic analogy, probably because dark polar winters in the high paleolatitudes and cold winter temperatures in the modern mid-latitudes similarly effect vegetation and enforce deciduousness. The transition from ‘greenhouse’ to icehouse’ began during the mid-Tertiary. The onset of climatic decline may be apparent in the appearance of diverse evergreen Pinaceae in the Eocene Axel Heiberg Island assemblages and other contemporaneous floras of the Eocene mid- to high latitudes. Neogene floras of northern Canada indicate that mixed evergreen coniferous/deciduous broad-leaved vegetation typical of modern boreal ecosystems persisted throughout the Arctic Archipelago until the onset of Pleistocene glaciation.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The Use of Geological and Paleontological Evidence in Evaluating Plant Phylogeographic Hypotheses in the Northern Hemisphere Tertiary
TL;DR: The history of the climatic and geographic features of the Tertiary of the Northern Hemisphere agrees with many phylogenetically based phylogeographic hypotheses of living angiosperm genera but indicates that some hypotheses require reanalysis.
Journal ArticleDOI
Eocene continental climates and latitudinal temperature gradients
David R. Greenwood,Scott L. Wing +1 more
TL;DR: Paleontological data indicate mild temperatures even at high latitudes and in mid-latitude continental interiors, whereas computer simulations of continental paleoclimates produce winter temperatures closer to modern levels as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI
Universal scaling in tree and vascular plant allometry: toward a general quantitative theory linking plant form and function from cells to ecosystems.
TL;DR: Current work supports the notion that scaling of how plants utilize space and resources is central to the development of a general synthetic and quantitative theory of plant form, function, ecology and diversity.
Journal ArticleDOI
Fossil biotas from the Okanagan Highlands, southern British Columbia and northeastern Washington State: climates and ecosystems across an Eocene landscape
TL;DR: This article reconstructed paleoclimates and forest types using collections from Republic in Washington State, USA, and Princeton, Quilchena, Falkland, McAbee, Hat Creek, Horsefly, and Driftwood Canyon in British Columbia, Canada.
Book ChapterDOI
Evolution and importance of wetlands in earth history
TL;DR: Greb et al. as mentioned in this paper studied the evolution and importance of wetlands in earth history, and found that the taxonomic composition of these wetlands was essentially structurally and probably dynamically, modern.
References
More filters
Book
Physics of Climate
José P. Peixoto,Abraham H. Oort +1 more
TL;DR: A review of the present understanding of the global climate system, consisting of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere, and their complex interactions and feedbacks is given from the point of view of a physicist as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI
Physics of Climate
TL;DR: Physics of Climate as mentioned in this paper is a suitable text for at least part of a general circulation course and the quantity and quality of information in this book are such that anyone involved in the study of the atmosphere or climate will wish to have it handy.
Book
Frost Survival of Plants: Responses and Adaptation to Freezing Stress
A. Sakai,W. Larcher +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, a number of books and reviews on the subject of chilling and frost resistance in plants have appeared: all of these publications, however, concentrate principally on the mechanisms of injury and resistance to freezing at the cellular or molecular level.
ReportDOI
A method of obtaining climatic parameters from leaf assemblages
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used multivariate analysis for character scoring in the context of leaf Physiognomic Methodology and applied it to the data from the World Wide Web.
Related Papers (5)
Eocene continental climates and latitudinal temperature gradients
David R. Greenwood,Scott L. Wing +1 more
Fossils and fossil climate: the case for equable continental interiors in the Eocene
Scott L. Wing,David R. Greenwood +1 more
Subtropical Arctic Ocean temperatures during the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum
Appy Sluijs,Stefan Schouten,Mark Pagani,Martijn Woltering,Henk Brinkhuis,Jaap S. Sinninghe Damsté,Gerald R. Dickens,Matthew Huber,Gert-Jan Reichart,Ruediger Stein,Jens Matthiessen,Lucas Joost Lourens,Nikolai Pedentchouk,Jan Backman,Kathryn Moran,Steve Clemens,Thomas M. Cronin,Frédérique Eynaud,Jérôme Gattacceca,Jérôme Gattacceca,Martin Jakobsson,R.W. Jordan,Michael A. Kaminski,John W. King,Nalân Koç,Nahysa C. Martinez,David McInroy,Theodore C. Moore,Matt O'Regan,Jonaotaro Onodera,Heiko Pälike,Brice R. Rea,Domenico Rio,Tatsuhiko Sakamoto,David C. Smith,Kristen St. John,Itsuki Suto,Noritoshi Suzuki,Kozo Takahashi,Mahito Watanabe,Masanobu Yamamoto +40 more