Late Holocene Sedimentary Archives of Tropical Cyclone Activity from the Northeastern Caribbean

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Storm-induced deposits resulting from storm surge and waves preserved within coastal sedimentary environments can provide a record of severe storms. Previous work has shown that intense hurricane strikes produce a distinctive sedimentary signature that can be used to reconstruct long-term records of these events. This proposal focuses on reconstructing sedimentary records of intense hurricanes from the northeastern Caribbean. Extensive coastal ponds and lagoons in eastern Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are well situated to receive allocthonous sediments during intense hurricane landfalls. These normally low-energy environments are dominated by fine-grained organic sediments, with the exception of episodic deposition of coarser-grained mineral sediments from the beach and near-shore environment during extreme storms. Sediment obtained from a series of cores from each site can be used to map and date storm-induced deposits. Significant variability in the frequency of the coarse-grained layers may indicate that changes in climate have modulated hurricane occurrence in the northeastern Caribbean during the late Holocene. With the resulting records of tropical cyclone activity, the links between the frequency of events and known climate oscillations such as the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period as well as indices of climate variability such as ENSO and the North Atlantic Oscillation will be explored.