• Canada

Northern sea ice levels are at an historical and millennial low, and nowhere are the effects of contemporary climate change more pronounced and destructive than in the Arctic. The Western Arctic rim of North America is considered the climate change "miners canary", with temperatures increasing at twice the global average. In the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta (Y-K Delta), Western Alaska, the indigenous Yup'ik Eskimos are facing life-altering decisions in an uncertain future, as rising temperatures, melting permafrost and coastal erosion threaten traditional subsistence lifeways, livelihoods and settlements - the Yup'ik face becoming "the world's first climate change refugees" (The Guardian 2008). For the Yup'ik, however - whose relationship to the total environment is central to their worldview - coping with global climate change entails far more than adapting to new physical and ecological conditions. This is reflected in the holistic incorporation of both natural and social phenomena embodied in the use of the Yup'ik word ella, (variably translating as "weather", "world", "universe", "awareness"), which is understood in intensely social as well as physical terms. Ella reflects the relationship Yup'ik society has with the natural world. As changing environmental conditions jeopardise traditional subsistence practices in the Arctic, their deep-rooted dependency and social connection to the land is also threatened - further severing their ecological ties and compromising their cultural adaptive capacity that has defined Yup'ik community and identity for thousands of years. Rapid climatic change is by no means a uniquely modern phenomenon and the indigenous cultures of this region have faced such life-changing situations before. In fact, Western Alaska has experienced pronounced climatic variations within the last millennia, with the forebears of the Yup'ik being similarly challenged by regime shifts that would have influenced the availability of important subsistence resources, much the same as their descendants face today. The ELLA project will use both the products and processes of archaeological research to understand how Yup'ik Eskimos adapted to rapid climate change in the late prehistoric past (AD 1350-1700), and to inform and empower descendant Yup'ik communities struggling with contemporary global warming today. Taking full advantage of the spectacular but critically endangered archaeological resource now emerging from melting permafrost along the Bering Sea coast, this community-based project will illuminate the adaptive capacity of the precontact Yup'ik; build sustainable frameworks for the documenting of local sites under threat; and reinforce Yup'ik cultural resilience by providing new contexts for encountering and documenting their past.

Modern marine ecosystems were established during the early Palaeozoic radiations of animals, first the 'Cambrian Explosion' and then, some 50 million years later, in the 'Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event.' By tracking the details of diversification through this critical interval, it should be possible to reconstruct not only the dynamics early animal evolution, but also the underlying effects of accruing ecological novelty. Unfortunately, the conventional fossil record represents only a fraction of ancient diversity, while famous 'soft-bodied' biotas such as the Burgess Shale are too rare to provide larger-scale patterns. I propose to circumvent these problems by exploiting a new, largely untapped source of palaeontological data: Burgess Shale-type microfossils. Like their macroscopic counterparts these fossils record the presence of non-biomineralizing organisms, but they also extend the view to include previously unrecorded forms and fine features. More significantly, they are proving to be quite common - to the extent that they can begin to be used to test macroevolutionary hypotheses. Systematic analysis of Burgess Shale-type microfossils through the Middle to Late Cambrian will shed fundamental new light on early evolutionary patterns, not least the poorly known interval between the Cambrian and Ordovician radiations. By integrating this enhanced fossil record with the principles of biological oceanography and macroecology, this study will also provide a unique, evolutionary view of how modern marine ecosystems function. This study will focus on the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin, which contains one of the largest, best preserved and most extensively sampled sequences of early Palaeozoic rocks on Earth. In addition to famously fossiliferous units exposed in the Rocky Mountain Fold and Thrust Belt - including the Burgess Shale itself - strata extend eastwards for over 1000 km in the subsurface, where they have been penetrated by hundreds of petroleum exploration boreholes. These subsurface materials are housed in state-of-the-art storage facilities in Calgary, Alberta and Regina, Saskatchewan and offer a unique opportunity to sample systematically through the whole of the Middle-Late Cambrian, and across an expansive shallow-water platform into continental-margin environments exposed in the Rocky Mountains. Preliminary work in both subsurface and outcrop occurrences has identified an exquisite range of Burgess Shale-type microfossils. More comprehensive sampling and analysis will substantially advance our understanding of early Palaeozoic diversity, macroevolutionary patterns, and the co-evolution of ecosystem function and environments.