A new interdisciplinary research project was recently launched, involving several subprojects that may be of interest to CAP members. Multiple sediment cores spanning the last 12,000 years were recovered from Saanich Inlet near the city of Victoria on Vancouver Island, Canada, as part of the Ocean Drilling Project (ODP Leg 169s). The ODP flagship JOIDES Resolution with its 200 foot high drill-tower provided a spectacular sight while coring for two days in mid August. The converted oil exploration vessel was operating in an unusual near-shore environment, coring in about 200 m of water instead of the thousands of meters in its typical ocean theatre of operations.

Supported mainly by a Collaborative Special Project grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, scientific analyses will be performed in the areas of geochemistry, sedimentology, paleoseismicity, microbiology and palaeoecology. The palaeoecology component will focus on questions of rates of change in marine productivity, using fish remains, foraminifera, diatoms, and dinoflagellates. For terrestrial environments along the Saanich Inlet, the focus will be on vegetation dynamics (including fire history) and climatic changes, based largely on pollen and charcoal analyses. Pollen analyses will be conducted by Richard Hebda (Royal British Columbia Museum) and Rolf Mathewes (Simon Fraser University), along with a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow.

The excitement generated by this project is a consequence of the special sedimentary conditions found at Saanich Inlet, which will allow for "ultra-high resolution" of critical intervals of rapid environmental change. Sedimentation rates are rapid, accumulating up to 118 m of deposits during postglacial time, and about 80 m of the core is characterized by superbly preserved laminations, almost certainly annual varves. Much of the basin fill must have formed under anoxic conditions, preserving the laminae and a wealth of organic materials. Stage 1 of the pollen analysis will involve taking approximately 550 samples, one at about every 25 years, to produce a high-resolution pollen diagram for the reconstruction of vegetation history. Stage 2 will focus on the analysis of critical and controversial periods of environmental change, such as the Younger Dryas chronozone, the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary, the very warm period centered around 9000 radiocarbon years BP, and others. Since the laminations are relatively thick (8-15 mm), it will be possible to sample annually and even subannually to provide an unmatched level of palynological detail for past periods of rapid environmental change.

When the results are all in, Saanich Inlet will join a select list of other near-shore anoxic basins such as the Santa Barbara Channel off California and Venezuela's Cariaco Basin. The data from these sites will be critical in understanding the dynamics of global climatic and oceanographic changes in the past, and will help us in preparing for the future.

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  This article first appeared in CAP Newsletter 19(2):16-17, 1996. It has been slightly edited for clarity.