in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago: currently, the northern limit is further south at Kuujjuaq in northern Quebec. Coastal Alaska was warm enough during the summer due to reduced sea ice in the Arctic Ocean to allow Saint Lawrence Island (now tundra) to have boreal forest, although inadequate precipitation caused a reduction in the forest cover in interior Alaska and Yukon Territory despite warmer conditions. The prairie-forest boundary in the Great Plains of the United States lay further west near Lubbock, Texas, whereas the current boundary is near Dallas. The period closed as temperatures steadily fell to conditions cooler and drier than the present, with a 468-year-long aridity pulse in central Europe at about 116,000 BC, and by 112,000 BC, a glacial period had returned. Kaspar et al. (GRL, 2005) performed a comparison of a coupled general circulation model (GCM) with reconstructed Eemian temperatures for Europe. Central Europe (north of the Alps) was found to be warmer than present; south of the Alps, conditions were 1–2 °C cooler than today. The model (generated using observed greenhouse gas concentrations and Eemian orbital parameters) generally reproduces these observations, leading them to conclude that these factors are enough to explain the Eemian temperatures. A 2018 study based on soil samples from Sokli in northern Finland identified abrupt cold spells ca. 120,000 years ago caused by shifts in the North Atlantic Current, lasting hundreds of years and causing temperature drops of a few degrees and vegetation changes in these regions. Sea level Sea level at peak was probably higher than today, with Greenland contributing , thermal expansion and mountain glaciers contributing up to , and an uncertain contribution from Antarctica. Recent research on marine sediment cores offshore of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet suggest that the sheet melted during the Eemian, and that ocean waters rose as fast as 2.5 meters per century. Global mean sea surface temperatures are thought to have been higher than in the Holocene, but not by enough to explain the rise in sea level through thermal expansion alone, and so melting of polar ice caps must also have occurred. Because of the sea level drop since the Eemian, exposed fossil coral reefs are common in the tropics, especially in the Caribbean and along the Red Sea coastlines. These reefs often contain internal erosion surfaces showing significant sea level instability during the Eemian. A 2007 study found evidence that the Greenland