CGRG Bibliography of Canadian Geomorphology
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Author : Beaudoin, A.B.
Date : 1999.
Title : What they saw: the climatic and environmental context for EuroCanadian settlement in Alberta.
Publication : Prairie Forum
Issue : 40(1):
Page(s) : 1-40.
Abstract
Late nineteenth century EuroCanadian settlers in Alberta moved into a landscape that was the product of millennia of postglacial climatic and environmental change and at least ten thousand years of human occupation. This paper sets the landscape encountered by those settlers into context by reviewing postglacial climatic and vegetation history. During and after deglaciation, warming and plant migration established the broad outline of ecozones (such as boreal forest, and prairies) by about 9,000 years ago. Subsequently, many palaeoenvironmental records show an interval of warmer and drier climate, signalled by increased salinity or drying of prairie lakes, northward retreat of the southern boreal forest margin, and increased fire frequency. This Hypsithermal Interval may be the best analogue for future conditions under continued climate warming. In about the last 4,000 years, climate has generally been cooler and moister, culminating in renewed ice advances in the Rockies in the last few centuries, the Little Ice Age. From this perspective, EuroCanadian settlement occurred in what was arguably the coolest and wettest interval of the last 10,000 years. The palaeoenvironmental record contains valuable information for land managers and planners, especially with respect to the vulnerable prairie ecoregion.
Bibliography of Canadian Geomorphology