Genevieve Potts

BSc. Geography and Sport (Manchester Metropolitan University).

MSc. Environmental Monitoring, Modelling and Reconstruction (University of Manchester).

Investigating Late-Holocene Climatic Fluctuations Using Palaeoecology in the Orkney Islands.

Supervisors: Jeff Blackford and James Rothwell.

Palaeoecological, Palaeoclimatological, Palynology and Quaternary environmental studies.

The aim of this research is to investigate climatic fluctuations during the Late-Holocene period (last 2000 years) and to discover how these changes influenced the environment at the time. This research will be imperative to providing more information when predicting current and future trends in the changing environment.

This project is focused in the Orkney Islands off the North East coast of Scotland. The Islands in nature and position are particularly sensitive to climatic changes from The North Atlantic Drift and the response to changing environmental conditions will be greater than some other larger land masses, which make them excellent indicators of change. Currently, there is a lack of environmental research published about this area; however there is a wealth of archaeological records from the study area, due to the preservation of vast amounts of Mesolithic artefacts. This research aims to bridge the gap and add depth of knowledge and understanding on how anthropological and natural environments interact to each other.

By collecting a series of monoliths from peat bogs across the Orkney Islands, a number of scientific procedures can then be performed to deduce past soil moisture, vegetation types and chemical compositions of the peat. These records will then be dated by C-14 and used to examine Late-Holocene climatic fluctuations in comparison with other studies and also to propose future responses in the area.