Correlation of the annual temperature reconstructed with _XRF-SR method and pollen data from varved sediments of Lake Kucherla, the Altai Mountains, for the last 500 years

Аннотация

This paper presents an attempt to correlate the temperature curve built by the transfer function method based on data from elemental analysis _XRF-SR and the results of pollen analysis of the core of the Kucherla Lake bottom sediments in the 1500 - 2016 CE. A comparison of geochemical reconstruction with pollen data was carried out by calculation of pair correlation coefficients. For this, temperatures were averaged to intervals corresponding to the interval of the pollen sample metric size (10 mm). Depending on the age-depth model the time interval of the pollen sample varied from 4 to 12 years. After that, a pairwise comparison of one-year data of temperature reconstruction and palynological analysis was performed. The paired correlations of mean annual temperatures obtained based on geochemical studies of the Kucherla Lake core by the _XRF-SR method and pollen data showed a significant negative correlation between the content of terrestrial herbs, grasses, and wormwood and mean annual temperatures. This can be explained by the expansion of the steppe area during cold periods, probably accompanied by a decrease in precipitation.