Description
Podritske and Gajewski evaluated the relationship that exists between diatoms and temperature by comparing a diatom stratigraphy based on high-resolution sampling with independent paleoclimatic records, after which they used a high-resolution diatom sequence of the past 9900 years that they developed from sediment-core data acquired from a small lake (unofficially named KR02) on Canada's Victoria Island (located at 71.34°N, 113.78°W) to place recent climatic change there "in an historical context." In doing so, they found "there is evidence of diatom community response to centennial-scale variations such as the 'Medieval Warm Period' (~1000-700 cal yr BP), 'Little Ice Age' (~800-150 cal yr BP) and recent warming." In addition, and most importantly, they discovered that recent warming-induced changes "are not exceptional when placed in the context of diatom community changes over the entire Holocene," stating that "although recent changes in diatom community composition, productivity, and species richness are apparent, they were surpassed at other periods throughout the Holocene." And they explicitly add, in this regard, that the most recent rate-of-change "was exceeded during the Medieval Warm Period."