“…Our study area is located in the western AP, where conditions are warmer than in the eastern part and summer temperatures closer to 0°C, thus the impact of warmer conditions in the terrestrial ecosystems is larger. In fact, Holocene climate variability has resulted in significant palaeoenvironmental and palaeoecological changes in ice-free areas in Maritime Antarctica, namely in the distribution of coastal fauna (Sun et al, 2000;del Valle et al, 2002), glacio-isostatic uplift and formation of raised beaches (Fretwell et al, 2010), variations on the pattern of the sedimentological processes prevailing in lakes (Toro et al, 2013) as well as advances and retreats of glaciers (Hall et al, 2010). In this sense, in Livingston island, fluctuations of the Rotch Dome glacier during the Holocene glacier are confirmed by lake records from the nearby Byers Peninsula (Björck et al, 1991(Björck et al, , 1996.…”