A 10 400-Year-Old Bowhead Whale (<i>Balaena mysticetus</i>) Skull from Ellef Ringnes Island, Nunavut: Implications for Sea-Ice Conditions in High Arctic Canada at the End of the Last Glaciation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Variations in the distribution and radiocarbon ages of postglacial bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) remains throughout the Canadian Arctic Archipelago indicate that the range of this whale expanded and contracted several times during the Holocene. Since the annual bowhead migration reflects the preference of this species for an ice-edge habitat, fossil bowheads have been used to infer that significant variations in summer sea-ice extent occurred throughout the archipelago during the last 10.5 thousand years. Previous studies have demonstrated that climatic amelioration, concomitant with enhanced meltwater flux from the retreating Laurentide Ice Sheet, cleared sea ice from the inter-island channels of the central archipelago, enabling early Holocene bowhead whales to extend beyond the range of contemporary populations. A 10.4 ka BP bowhead whale skull was discovered on Ellef Ringnes Island in the northern Canadian Arctic Archipelago, 700 km north of its previously reported early Holocene range. Consequently, sea ice along the polar margin of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago is inferred to have been less extensive than previously recognized. Both biological evidence and glaciological evidence suggest that this reduction in sea-ice extent was the result of climate forcing, amplified by meltwater-driven outflows from the rapidly retreating marine-based sector of the Innuitian Ice Sheet. Following a reduction of these outflows at ~9 ka BP, sea-ice conditions worsened, despite ongoing climatic amelioration, preventing additional bowhead whale incursions until ~4 ka BP.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".